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.

That’s great to hear because you guys had such great chemistry.

Luckily, that was the last scene we shot together, very late at night. I mean, the greatest kept secret in the industry is that acting is 90% sitting and drinking La Croix. So we had a lot of downtime and we were really able to just become friends by that point.

The whole cast—I worked a little bit with Marisa [Abela] and I worked a little bit with Ken [Leung]. Myha’la came to set when she wasn't shooting just to visit. That is how you know that is a good set to work on. I don't know if I've ever had a job where I showed up when I wasn't called to set just to visit, and so I think that's really telling about the kind of people that work on that show. It made the experience really easy and really less stressful than I think it could have been had I been on a set with people who were less welcoming.

All bodies are beautiful, but you looked particularly great. Have you watched the sauna scene yet?

Thank you. I haven't seen it myself yet. I've only seen the screenshots that leaked a couple of weeks ago that were circulating online. It's hard to have any sort of objectivity about how you look, but I'm not displeased. One of the hardest things to do is look hot naked while sitting. It's been a longstanding fitness goal of mine to look good without my shirt on while I'm sitting. It is such a difficult thing to achieve. That was a much bigger concern of mine than being full-frontal.

The sauna scene is about Rob flirting with Frank to get the outcome he wants, and we don’t see what actually winds up happening. But by the end of the episode, it's clear that Rob did not fully influence Frank. What went down in that sauna?

There were a lot of different versions of how explicit we would be in terms of what happened after the sauna. And I think what we all decided with the director and Harry is that the ambiguity is a bit more interesting, especially for Harry's character in that moment. It’s like, “what did he do to then not get what he wanted?” They leave the audience to fill in the blanks depending on how they feel about Harry's character and their imagination of what Harry's character would do for Pierpoint. I think it's more interesting than making the decision that he's going to whore himself out or not. Leaving it hanging in the air like that, I think, is really fun. I hope that people are writing fanfiction about us.

Well, what do you think happened?

I’ve changed my mind a couple of times. Harry and I have talked about it and we have, at certain points, had differing opinions and then similar opinions, and then it's changed a million times. I haven't seen a cut of the episode. I've only seen bits and pieces when I went in to do ADR.

Ultimately, I think they did maybe start to hook up and then I don't think Robert—as sexually progressive as he is and horny as he is and as much as he loves Pierpoint—I think he wasn't able to really go through with it. Frank is a vindictive gay guy and that is part of why the ending happened the way it did. [laughs] But leaving it plenty wide open for a return at some point. Who knows where this character is going to go next? Maybe a spinoff show, maybe not. You never know.