Before his terrifying turn on Industry, Asim Chaudhry was hilarious on People Just Do Nothing

[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers of Industry’s season-three finale.]  

A lot has been made of Kit Harington’s surprising—and frankly, really refreshing—performance on this season of Industry as the kinky, quirky, charming, entitled, ayahuasca-indulging CEO Sir Henry Muck. But another turn on the show, by another British actor known to his fans for having a completely different on-screen energy, deserves a shout-out. In the closing minutes of the HBO drama’s propulsive season finale, Asim Chaudhry, last seen as Rishi’s (Sagar Radia) loan shark in “White Mischief,” returns, making for the saddest, scariest blowing out of birthday candles we’ve seen in quite some time as he toys with his debtor and, as jaunty French pop turns up, nonchalantly blows out the brains of Rishi’s wife (Emily Barber). It’s a scene that leaves you sick in your stomach, and, as Manuel Betancourt pointed out in his recap, almost feels like a Tarantino-style execution spliced into 75 minutes of prestige TV. Yet somehow creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who wrote and directed the episode, pull it off, making this wrapping up of Rishi’s story (for now) shockingly brutal but also realistic and of a piece.

The casting of a cold-blooded Chaudhry here feels particularly inspired because, for a huge swath of the 2010s, he delighted as the ever-smiling, -bubbly, -confident, and -delusional Chabuddy G in People Just Do Nothing, a BBC Three mockumentary he co-created with Allan Mustafa, Steve Stamp, and Hugo Chegwin. The show, which feels like a sort of mashup of This Is Spinal Tap, if that band never actually made it or had any lower rung to fall to, and the original Office, with a distinctly gray and overcast backdrop of everydayness, centers on MC Grindah (Mustafa) and DJ Beats (Chegwin), the UK-garage duo behind the the pirate-radio station Kurupt FM. Do people actually listen to Kurupt? Not really, no, save for Grindah’s partner and co-parent Miche (a very funny Lily Brazier). Yet the station, which runs out of a housing estate in Brentford, West London, that’s littered with empties, roaches, and cigarette butts, basically rules the lives of Grindah, Beats, and their crew, which includes the ever-drug-addled Steves (Stamp), Decoy (Dan Sylvester), who’s clearly the biological father of Grindah’s kid, and Chaudhry’s Chabuddy G. 

In PJDN’s premiere, Chabuddy (“a.k.a. Chabuds, a.k.a. the Rig Doctor, a.k.a. the Mayor of Hounslow,” as he’s self-dubbed) is described by Beats like so: “He’s one of them entrepreneur characters; like, he can literally get you anything. [Pauses] Not drugs though ’cause we get them from Decoy’s uncle. Can you—can you start that again? Don’t put that bit in.” The “anything” Beats speaks of comes from Chabuddy’s never-ending stream of get-rich-quick schemes and on-a-lark business ventures. Over the course of the show’s four-episode first season alone, he bottles Polish vodka (it’s just window polish), hordes bags of “peanut dust,” manages an internet cafe in his home, slings a perfume called Sean Paul Gaultier World Exclusive, and tries his hand at party-planning a kid’s birthday (complete with erotic cakes, a gyrating male stripper in a clown costume, and balloons that are actually blown-up lubed condoms). Two seasons and many failed businesses later, he opens a club, the Champagne Steam Rooms, and it goes about as terribly as you’d expect.

Which brings us to part of what makes the show—and Chaudhry’s character and performance—work: its consistency. This is a very loose hangout comedy, one where the real world and adulthood keep knocking at these dumb dudes’ doors, only for them to invariably block out the noise by feeding into their own delusions of grandeur or rebellion or whatever else keeps them steeped in arrested development and willing to keep Kurupt afloat. But there is a fragility and sweetness bubbling just under all of the idiocy. (There’s a bit of verisimilitude too—that some of these guys were into pirate radio and garage and grew up on a similar estate to the one depicted in the show isn’t surprising.) Deep down, Chabuddy has to know he’s not the player and entrepreneurial titan he presents himself as, just as PJDN’s main duo knows they’re not underground heroes that could break big at any moment (in a genre that’s no longer in fashion, no less). But we’d rather hear our optimistic guy rationalize otherwise, with a pleasant air and in the face of reality and often impending destitution. “I just love the way that she kind of treats me like shit,” Chabuddy says warmly of his wife, who openly cheats on him. “I’d rather be with somebody like that than be with some bloody bimbo bitch—’cause, let’s be honest, most of the girls are like that with me. They see the money, they see the mustache, they see the Gucci, the Prada.” Preach it, king.