RULE OF LAWTEY

Stepping up to play a comic-book icon in the big-budget sequel Joker: Folie à Deux could prove a life-changing moment for Industry star Harry Lawtey. But he's trying not to think about it...

- PAUL KIRKLEY

FIVE YEARS AGO, Harry Lawtey was sitting in a Cardiff cinema, the sole patron in a 10am screening of Todd Phillips' twisted psychological thriller, Joker. "That's kind of my preference: an empty theatre, and always a morning screening," says the actor, who only a year out of drama school had just begun shooting a new BBC/ HBO drama about young investment bankers at the city's Wolf Studios. "And it completely floored me, that film, as a piece of work. The way it was just so unapologetically dark, and challenged people's expectations of what you are able to do with those [comic-book] stories."

Fast-forward four years, and Lawtey - back in the Welsh capital to film the third series of what the world now knows as Industry returned to the same deserted cinema, on another morning off, to watch his friend and co-star Marisa Abela appear in Greta Gerwig's Barbie. By which time, he'd already wrapped filming on a Hollywood blockbuster of his own playing Gotham City's legendary district attorney Harvey Dent in the highly anticipated sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux.

"I didn't go back there as any kind of fullcircle moment," stresses Lawtey, when I meet the 27-year-old at a hotel close to his home in Shepherd's Bush. "But I did definitely have a flashback to that moment a few years earlier in the same theatre. It's a bit of a cliché, I know, but if you'd said to that kid back then, 'This is what's going to happen...' he wouldn't have been able to fathom it."

Landing the part was so simple (he made a self-tape, Phillips liked it, and hired him pretty much on the spot), he feels "almost embarrassed about it". But arriving in LA for the shoot, he knew he had to meet the moment. "The expectation of the profile of the film, and the company I was keeping on set - was irrefutable, really, and hard to ignore," he says. "But then I feel that in anything I do. Which can often be a burden to my enjoyment of the work."