Joel Kim Booster is well aware that showing skin is part of his personal brand. In his 2022 Netflix comedy special, Psychosexual, Booster jokes about having his nudes readily available on the internet, quipping that he still sends naked photos of himself out “with reckless abandon.” However, the Loot and Fire Island star didn’t expect that his reckless abandon would lead to a steamy guest-starring role on the third episode of the third season of HBO’s breakout series Industry, created by Konrad Kay and Mickey Down.
“This never happens to me, but they came to me with this role,” Booster says. In episode three, “It,” Booster guest stars as Frank Wade, a Pierpoint employee in the equity research division who has to publish a buy-or-sell recommendation on Lumi, the green energy company run by Kit Harington’s Henry Muck, which recently IPO’d.
A fan of Industry since it premiered in 2021, Booster tells me that he’s “never had an easier time” booking an acting role than on the series. “The boys are apparently fans,” Booster says, of Kay and Down. “They had this part written and they came to me and said, ‘There’s this creep in a steam room and we immediately thought of you.’ I guess the brand is strong.”
The steam room wound up becoming a sauna, where Pierpoint banker Rob, played by Harry Lawtey, flirts with Frank in the hopes of influencing his buy-sell recommendation. Their cackling chemistry is reminiscent of the sauna scene in Challengers between Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor except for one major difference—Booster is completely naked. “They said very early on that this would be a requirement,” he says. “It was included with the offer, like, ‘Are you cool with that?’”
He was so cool with it, in fact, that Booster says it wasn’t even the most nerve-wracking part about the shoot. “I was more nervous about stepping into a prestige HBO drama than I was about the nudity, because the nudity is pretty par for the course for me in my everyday life,” says Booster. “Professionally, this was a big deal for me to be taken seriously as an actor and have people believe that I can do a pretty grounded, dramatic, serious part that’s not comedy heavy. I’m really grateful for that opportunity.”
Over the phone, Booster chats about the trickiness of looking hot while sitting, working with Lawtey, and what he believes really went down in the sauna.
Vanity Fair: So, let’s talk about your big scene, which happens to take place in a sauna when you’re butt naked.
Joel Kim Booster: You know what’s so funny to me? This is not the first interview I have done about my brief appearance on Industry, and you are the only person who’s asked about this scene in particular, explicitly. It’s like, ‘Guys, I’m a one-episode guest star. I have a one episode arc on this show where I’m in approximately three scenes and you are not going to ask me about the reason you really want to interview me about this episode?’ The reason it’s a big deal is because I’m doing full-frontal for the first time. Let’s be real.
Did you have to think about whether to say yes at all?
I didn’t think about it at all when I initially said yes. It was an exciting opportunity to do something really different. And as I famously said in my Netflix special, my nudes are out there. If you want to see me naked, it’s readily available if you know the correct search terms and dark web websites to visit. And I continue to this day to send out my naked pictures of myself to random strangers frequently. So it didn’t seem like that big a deal at first to do it, at first I would say.
Take me to the actual moment where you’re on set, and it’s time, and the camera’s about to roll. How did that feel?
It is crazy because it didn’t really dawn on me until right before we shot. All of my nudes that have leaked online previously, it is my hard penis, okay? With a flaccid penis, there’s a lot of variables at play. It can look a lot of different ways. Stress is a big factor in that. I woke up and I was like, ‘I cannot think about this because the more I think about this, the more I will spiral.’ And then you lose control of what’s going on down there. I will say Harry Lawtey, who plays Robert on the show, is who I filmed the bulk of my scenes with. [He was] so nice, so welcoming, made me feel truly a part of the team at Industry. He has also been in my position doing full-frontal, and I couldn’t have had a better scene partner who put me at ease and just really made me able to focus on actually doing that scene and not be thinking about what’s going on downstairs.