Photo: Nick Strasburg/HBO
Industry is not a show for the faint of heart: Semen gets licked off mirrors, there is near-constant screaming, and Harper Stern makes the most stressful decision possible at every turn. Shock is this show’s specialty. So it’s saying something that it still feels like a surprise when Joel Kim Booster shows up naked during “It,” the third episode of Industry’s currently airing third season.
The actor and comedian’s work, like his movie Fire Island and his Netflix special Psychosexual, is known for taking on matters of sex with blunt realism, and he brought a similar frankness to his guest-starring role as a Pierpoint worker with the ability to make the Lumi investment sink or swim with his public report. Frank Wade, who is gossiped about before he appears, first shows up onscreen in a sauna with Harry Lawtey’s Robert, but there are really three characters present: Robert, Frank, and Frank’s penis. The erotic tension throughout the scene is as heavy as the steam, and part of the thrill comes not just from seeing a real, flaccid penis, but from seeing it beneath a familiar face.
Booster calls Frank, who only has a few minutes of screen time, “a low-density, high-impact character,” and he seems well aware of the reaction his full-frontal appearance will invite, if also a little incredulous. “Even the fact that we’re having this conversation is funny to me,” he says. “God knows I’ve been the one-episode guest star plenty of times before and I’ve never gotten press for it.”
How did Industry get in touch with you?
I don’t really know the specifics, but I guess you would say they like my work. We’ve never talked about it, that’s just what I’ve gotten from the producers. But they came to me with this part, and it was the first time this has ever happened in my career, where I have been offered a role for a show that I actually like and want already.
Had you publicly said that you liked the show?
I definitely have probably tweeted about Industry in the past, because I’ve been on the ground floor of loving that show since it first premiered. But I never communicated with the boys before.
When did full frontal come into the picture?
That came in immediately. It was a part of the initial ask. My first reaction was, “My nudes have been circulating on the internet since 2017.” I send out pictures of my naked body. I don’t even use albums on Grindr at this point. I don’t give a shit. I’m very like, “Whatever, people have seen it and they’ll continue to see it and I work really hard to look like this and I don’t know how long I’ll look like this.”
At the same time, even if your nudes leak, it’s only gonna be gay guys who are looking at it.
Right, right. Yeah.
Did the broader audience of it all affect your POV?
It’s not something I even thought about until this week when stills leaked. They’re fully online.
That’s still probably only gay guys looking.
Yeah. The whole HBO viewing audience is gonna see my dick now. That came into play a little bit on the day of filming too, because it’s all well and good to say, “Whatever, if people really wanted to see my dick, it’s very easy to find my dick online.” But that’s also my hard dick. There’s a lot of variables with a flaccid penis that come into play in front of a whole crew of people. As soon as you start thinking about the state of your penis flaccid, you’re in this hole where it’s like, I have to stop thinking about it, because the more I think about it, the worse it’s gonna be presented. I was definitely in my head.
I will say, Harry has also done full frontal before, and I was so grateful to have him on set with me, and he was so lovely the entire time. Most of my scenes were with him, and he was just gentle and kind and supportive, because he knows how weird it is to want to be professional even while it’s strange and awkward. Even as a very sex-positive, out-there person, it’s just a very vulnerable thing to do.
Even if you’re sex positive, you still exist in the culture.
I can’t really control how my dick looks. I love my dick. I think I have a good dick. The reviews have been mostly good across my life. I’ve had a lot of sex. The thing is that I’m an Asian man, and the No. 1 joke that comes with Asian men is small dicks. And it’s like, I’m now suddenly thinking, God, is it bigger or smaller than people assumed it would be? It’s just a part of the equation that I truly didn’t fully wrestle or engage with until I was on set naked.
How did they tell you that this was necessary?
They said they flagged it in the offer: “There is full-frontal nudity involved in the role.” Honestly, I think part of that is probably why they asked me. My closing joke in my Netflix special is about hooking up in a sauna. It’s part of my brand. They had a sauna scene and they went with someone who they knew had experience and had been there.
What was it like filming such an erotically tense scene?
Our director (Zoé Wittock) was great. It’s a delicate thing, because she’s trying to balance my own feelings on set and also just approach it like a director would with any other scene. It was a very light touch in terms of direction. With that scene, a lot of the direction will be more about the coverage and the editing than me and Harry. That was the last thing we shot. We had developed a pretty good rapport already, and our chemistry was pretty set.
There’s an interesting thing that you have to do in that scene, which is not-quite proposition him, and then later the audience has to wonder how it would have gone if they’d fucked.
I actually don’t know how they edited this. In the original script, it is heavily implied that maybe we did hook up.
Oh, interesting.
I know that there was some discussion about it and they made it maybe even more ambiguous, or even more clear, that they didn’t hook up. So I’m actually interested.
It crossed my mind that they did, but it seemed to me more like Robert chose not to use his sexuality, and that might have fucked things up. You haven’t gotten a screener yet?
I’ve seen little bits and pieces because I went in and did ADR for the scene. I’ve seen that version of this scene. But I don’t know how the whole episode is cut together yet.
What did you want to get across about this character?
It’s a low-density, high-impact character. It feels even weird to be talking about it right now, because I’m in one episode — I’m barely in the episode. The only thing that makes it sort of noteworthy is that I’m naked in it.
I think the other thing that may have appealed to them about casting me is sort of the innate confidence of this character, that is something that I have maybe tried to bake into my stand-up persona as well. This character in Industry, much like my character in Fire Island and on Loot, is a much more confident guy than I actually am in real life. It’s nice to be in a power position as an Asian man. I just wanted to honor that.
Are you gonna be watching it along with X?
I think I’m gonna log off for the day. I think I have a nice penis, but people are gonna say what they’re gonna say about my body, and a lot of it is gonna have to do with how they feel about me as a person. I would describe my penis as being in that liminal space between “objectively good” and “objectively bad,” because, again, it’s flaccid. No one really has a good indication of what it actually looks like on the field.