Industry's Harry Lawtey: ‘A lot of actors, then and now, are quite liberal with their sexuality'

Telegraph

14-03-2025

Harry Lawtey's drunk. We're in the pub in west London on a Monday – a Monday lunchtime – and here he is: eyes gone, slurring this way and that, basic motor skills lost. The carcass of a halloumi sandwich decays before him.
'So…' he begins, reaching for an empty glass, missing, then grasping it loosely, his wrist swilling around like he's holding a sparkler. 'You can see the brain making its choices, can't you? Any effective masking is gone. I pick up the glass and then…'
His head flicks up, an index finger thrusts in the air. 'I realise I haven't finished my first sentence… I'm lagging, my body can't do things because my functions are down. I'm malfunctioning. And that's quite funny, isn't it? It's like watching a toddler.'
Lawtey sets the glass back down. My requested 'How To Act Half-Cut' masterclass has concluded. Lamentably, actors don't really get drunk in interviews these days. Lawtey's had a beer with lunch, but a ginger one.
'You know,' he adds, 'I worked with an actor once who, before each 'drunk' take, would just spin around in circles until he almost fell over. And the scenes looked great. So there's no right way to do it.'
Lawtey is a sensible man, the sort of 28-year-old whose Monday night plans go no further than 'the big shop at Lidl, then maybe the gym', but he's had plenty of practice playing a brand of bloke who's just the opposite: impulsive, idealistic, sweet but damaged.
For the last five years, he's played youthful finance bro Robert Spearing in three critically acclaimed seasons of Industry. Now, he's portraying the original suave hell-raiser, Richard Burton, in Mr Burton, a film about the Welsh actor's beginnings. Both roles regularly called on those drunk acting abilities. 'I guess I have had to do it quite a few times now,' he concedes.
Lawtey's in a faded off-white T-shirt, ankle-grazer beige jeans, Adidas Sambas and a baseball cap. Bashful and mannerly, he occasionally seems uncomfortable with the amount of natural charm he emits. Judging by the consideration a student-age waitress is paying to our table, she's either a huge devotee of The Telegraph or we have one of his many fans in our midst. I suppose we'll never know for certain.
Industry, a BBC/HBO co-production, follows the chaotic lives of a group of 20-something graduates at a fictional London investment bank. In the early series, Robert was a Jack the Lad who'd mask his insecurities by shagging, snorting, smoking or shotting whatever vice was put before him. As a result, Lawtey says, some people have met him on nights out and 'assumed I'm a right sesh head'.
The reality is far healthier. 'I was actually quite a late bloomer, drinking-wise. Over time I migrated towards it, joining in with friends, and realised what an amazing bonding agent it can be – especially in Britain.'
In his shy, dry teenage years, Lawtey spent a lot of time observing. 'It's a mad thing, this completely legalised, mind-altering drug that in the wrong hands is entirely destructive. Maybe this is just indicative of the boys I call my friends, but we're all in a kind of ongoing dialogue with our own drinking, and there's no pressure or expectation.'
In the week before Christmas, for instance, he met his three best friends for a pint. By chance, they all ordered 0% Guinness. 'We had a laugh but that was the end of it. And I think that's really cool.' He pauses. 'But drinking can be great as well! It just depends where you're at.'
On either side of the Atlantic, viewing figures for Industry climbed with each series, while its stars – including the trio of Lawtey, Marisa Abela (Yasmin) and Myha'la (Harper) – have become some of the most in-demand young actors in Hollywood. Abela played Amy Winehouse in Back to Black. Myha'la played opposite Julia Roberts in the Netflix film Leave the World Behind. Lawtey was cast in Joker: Folie à Deux opposite Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga.
Industry begins production on a fourth series this month, but Lawtey will not be returning. The named reason of 'scheduling conflicts' is technically true, given Lawtey is making the Cold War thriller Billion Dollar Spy with Russell Crowe in Los Angeles, but both actor and character were also ready for a new start.
The finale of series three saw Robert happy and ambitious again in California, eyes firmly on the future. Lawtey could relate to that. 'Ultimately I feel like I'm in a place where I've said everything I had to say with a character, and I think both me and the writers felt mutually happy with where we left him,' he says.
Lawtey has never actually seen Industry – 'I don't need to, it's not for me' – but he was happy with the conclusion. 'There was actually a stage direction after my final line, in my final scene of the show, which literally read: 'On Robert – transformation complete.' And that sat really well with me.
'Now, I feel unmoored, but in a really good way. And ready for the next chapter.'
The production of Industry was based in Cardiff, and chance has seen Lawtey make four or five other things in Wales ever since he was a child actor. If a job is in the UK, he tends to drive himself from his home not far from here, and it's now at the point where crossing the bridge on the M4 is what he 'associates with going to work'. He laughs. 'People don't know how amazing Wales is. The girls on Industry used to say I could work for the tourist board.'
But Mr Burton could hardly have been made anywhere else. It charts the beautiful and remarkable story of how Richard Jenkins Jr, a miner's son from Pontrhydyfen, in the Afan Valley near Port Talbot, and the 12th of 13 children, rose to become one of the most celebrated actors in the world in large part thanks to a schoolmaster, Philip Burton (played by Toby Jones), who spotted his talent.
After the death of their mother when he was two, Richard was largely raised by an elder sister before eventually moving in with Philip, his acting tutor. The latter would become his legal guardian, and in 1943, Richard adopted his surname. In later life, Philip called Richard 'my son, to all intents and purposes'. The actor would write that 'I owe him everything'.
Richard Burton has been played before, of course – notably by Dominic West opposite Helena Bonham Carter's Elizabeth Taylor in the 2013 film Burton and Taylor, and Johnny Flynn in the 2023 play The Motive and the Cue – but those portrayals have largely focused on the man as myth: crisp tailoring, tumbler in hand, stentorian purr, and never far from Taylor.
'It makes sense because he and Elizabeth were so vivid and sensational,' Lawtey says. 'Those [depictions] have always been interesting but not necessarily accurate or sensitive to either party. I'm a general sceptic of biopics, I think they rarely work, but I always think the best recipe is to hone in on a period and find a junction where you can find the DNA of a person.'
He marinated himself in Burton's diaries, interviews, old footage and recordings. 'I can't think of another life in the public sphere where the distance between the place he begins and the place he ends is so phenomenal. It's the quintessential working class hero story.
'There's this amazing diary entry where he's thinking about who among his friends he'd like to be on a desert island with. He basically lists the most iconic figures of the day – JFK, Salvador Dalí, James Baldwin. All these people wanted a piece of Richard, and he's a miner's son from Port Talbot. So it'd be a fool's errand to try and tell that whole story.'
He went through Burton's back catalogue 'very nervously, really, because I did feel the burden of it', and recalled something Abela said before Back to Black: 'At some point you just have to take some ownership of it, otherwise you're just going to be immobilised.'
Abela suffered tabloid and social media scorn for playing Winehouse, long before anybody had seen her performance. 'Don't even get me started on that,' he says. 'Just as a friend it infuriated me, the lack of tact and awareness to allow that cycle to repeat in some ways. It was beyond nonsense.'
After the halfway mark of Mr Burton, the action jumps eight years to Burton at the Royal Shakespeare Company. By that point he is closer to the legend we know: the sweetness has been tempered by ego and alcohol, and the voice has become the voice.
'You don't get actors these days who are identifiable by a single trait, but Richard came from a generation who were first and foremost orators. He's kind of literally the voice of a generation, a whole cohort listened to War of the Worlds. So that was an added pressure.'
Sometimes he would be both Burtons – downtrodden, rugby-playing schoolboy then swaggering, chain-smoking celebrity; unvarnished South Walian lilt then RSC-trained baritone – all in the same filming day. 'They didn't feel like the same character at all. But are you the same person as you were eight years ago? There's an emotional spine that remains the same, but a casing, an armour, that's different.'
Lawtey is impressive throughout, but particularly brilliant as the later, more age-appropriate Burton. He had the blessing of Burton's actor daughter, Kate, 'which meant the world'. The first time she visited the set to offer observations, Lawtey was terrified. 'Then within a minute of meeting her I was like, 'You're an idiot, he obviously belongs to her – he's her dad. He's someone's dad.' But she has such a spirit of generosity with sharing his memory.'
Ultimately, Lawtey 'had to realise that I have him on lease. He doesn't belong to me, but for this period of time I'll take care of him… as wanky as that sounds.' Lawtey grimaces slightly, then shakes his head and laughs. 'But it's a wanky profession.'
If it's on a menu, Lawtey almost always orders the halloumi. 'Squeaky cheese, we call it in my house. I ate copious amounts as a child,' he says. His parents met in Barton-upon-Humber, North Lincolnshire (he's a devoted Hull City fan), but his father's job as an aircraft engineer in the RAF saw the family – Lawtey has one elder brother, George – move to Cyprus after his fifth birthday.
'I was brought up on an island in the Mediterranean, but on a British military base you've got every regional accent. So my party trick became voices. My brother used to get me to put on accents for his friends. It was like conditioning.'
His parents never put pressure on either of their sons to continue the family line of military men (George is a football analyst who's just finished a role at Swansea City), and later asked Lawtey if he'd like to go to drama school in London.
He did. Aged 13, he auditioned for the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School and, thanks to scholarships and subsidies, started later that year, staying with a host family in term time. It was trying for a timid and anxious teenager, but acting became a relief. 'A distraction from life. Life's difficult. I was quite a sensitive, fragile but happy child, and this was just a great way for me to engage with the universe and activate me.'
A few years later, his parents moved back to the UK – they're now based near RAF Brize Norton – while Lawtey enrolled at Drama Centre London. 'Trauma Centre', as its alumni half-jokingly call it. 'I only realised after I left but I chose the drama school that was most similar to the military. It was f—king rigorous, completely tribal and cultish and… brilliant. I loved every minute.'
He's far from the only actor raised as a military brat. The itinerant upbringing, among all walks of life, where parental rank quietly looms over everything, makes code-switching a necessity. 'Of course, but we're a nation of code-switchers. My parents still do it, they're in a constant dialogue with their own class. Because we're obsessed with it as a country.
'Pretty much any piece of work I've done that I'm interested in – certainly Industry and Mr Burton – speaks to class. Acting is still about class. It's better than it was, but it's never going to be a meritocracy, that's just not the system we operate in.'
Lawtey's own relationship with social class 'had become confused even before I got an opportunity to be on the telly, because I certainly didn't have the childhood my parents had, but they've coloured it with their perspective.'
As a result, he may be on billboards in Times Square, feel familiar enough to drop the 'Lady' from Gaga when he talks about her, and find himself at the odd fashion show – he appeared in an advert for the designer Thom Browne – but he's tried not to get lofty. What's his most extravagant purchase? 'There's only one – a home. Genuinely, ask anyone.' (I later ask two of his friends, and they confirm it.)
In fact, the first time Lawtey had a meeting with his agent at drama school, she asked what his long-term goal was, expecting, 'winning an Oscar '. 'I said I want to be a homeowner. She laughed and was like, 'All right, no one's ever said that before. We'll see what we can do…' But it was an emotional goal for me. Like, if my hobby can support my life, what a dream that would be.'
Industry gave him that dream – as well as two 'lifelong friends' in the 'special people and true generational talents' of Abela and Myha'la. When the show started, it caused a sensation for its commitment to sex, drugs and rock 'n' bankrolling. The tone was set when Yasmin ordered Robert to masturbate in front of her in the office toilets, then eat the results off the mirror. And people say Gen Z are afraid of the workplace…
Lawtey and Abela used to joke that they knew the show must be getting good when journalists stopped solely asking about nudity and intimacy co-ordinators. Learning how to take drugs was bad enough. Google helped, he says, as did a crew member who 'had a lot more experience in that area'.
Robert, Lawtey says, was always a 'lost boy' who only began as a caricature. He and the young Richard Burton are, I point out, two charming men who attempt to break into a rarefied industry some believe they don't belong in. They've also got a sexual ambiguity about them.
He weighs this up. 'Yeah, I think that's fair. They both had that. There were suggestions, I think, throughout Richard's life, though nothing necessarily concrete…' A smile dances across Lawtey's face. 'I think a lot of actors, then and now, are quite… liberal with their own sexuality. And why not, I suppose.'
Is he? 'Er, I'd rather not speak about anything like that, the more people know me intimately, maybe the less interesting I am as an actor. Or less convincing. My favourite actors are the ones I know least about.'
One of those favourites has always been Toby Jones, another Joaquin Phoenix. He first met the latter two years ago with the camera already rolling on Joker: Folie à Deux. Phoenix was in full Joker make-up as Arthur Fleck; Lawtey was the clean-cut antagonist Harvey Dent.
Lawtey can be 'a complete neurotic' about work, and had a small crisis before that film. 'I was very, very nervous, I'd been working consistently for about 14 months and didn't feel match fit. But then the day before shooting started I just thought, 'It's too big to feel nervous. This is as big as it gets. If this isn't fun, go home. You're wasting your time.''
That freed him to put in what is perhaps the best performance in a film critics otherwise eviscerated. Gaga, he says, was 'so generous, so encouraging about my work'. Had she seen Industry? 'Ha, no. I don't even think Todd [Phillips, the director] had seen it. No one had a clue who I was, genuinely.'
The limp critical and box office response 'didn't bother me in the slightest. Maybe that's easy for me to say as it wasn't resting on my shoulders, but I had a premiere in Leicester Square, and I remember being on the red carpet and seeing my parents seeing me in this world… I'd take that over a box office hit any day.
'The film is what it is, but I admire their appetite to take a swing. In the current climate it's easier than ever to sit back on IP and rest on your laurels, regurgitating safety. And they certainly didn't do that.'
By now, people have compared Lawtey to all sorts – Jude Law, Daniel Craig, Michael Fassbender – and mooted him for everything from James Bond to the upcoming Harry Potter series (he dismisses both). As it is, he has Billion Dollar Spy and an unannounced TV series to get on with, but no bucket list.
'Not at all. Why would I? I have almost zero autonomy over my own career,' he insists. Ideally, he simply wants to build a reputation like Jones's, who never seems to choose a bad project. 'Don't chase being famous, just chase that: that people think whatever you do will be good.'
Lawtey pulls his cap down. As we get up to mosey towards the Tube, talk returns to biopics. The thing you so often get from them, he says, is the impression that to be a brilliant artist, you have to be an insufferable person.
'And I suppose it's often true, but it certainly shouldn't be a prerequisite,' Lawtey says. 'I've been so lucky so far, working with some real elite talents. And that's my main takeaway: you don't have to be a dick.' He grins. 'It's really heartening.'
Mr Burton is in cinemas from 4 April