Photo: Nick Strasburg/HBO

industry is not a show for the faint of heart: There is cum licked off mirrors, there is almost constant screaming, and Harper Stern makes the most stressful decision possible at every opportunity. Shock is this show’s specialty, so it says something that it still feels like a surprise when Joel Kim Booster shows up naked in “It,” the third episode of industryThe third season is currently being broadcast.

The work of the actor and comedian, as well as his film Fire Island and his Netflix special Psychosexualis known for tackling sex subjects with blunt realism, and he brought a similar candor to his guest role as a Pierpoint employee with the ability to derail the Lumi investment with his public report. Frank Wade, who had been gossiped about even before his appearance, first appears onscreen in a sauna with Harry Lawtey’s Robert, but there are actually three characters present: Robert, Frank, and Frank’s penis. The erotic tension throughout the scene is as thick as the steam, and part of the thrill comes not just from seeing a real, flaccid penis, but from seeing it under a familiar face.

Booster calls Frank, who is on screen for just a few minutes, “a low-density, high-impact character,” and he seems well aware of the reaction his frontal appearance will provoke, if a little incredulous. “The very fact that we’re having this conversation is funny to me,” he says. “God knows, I’ve been a guest star in an episode many times and never got any press for it.”

How is industry contact you?
I don’t really know the specifics, but you could say they like my work. We never talked about it, that’s just what I got from the producers. But they came to me with this role and it was the first time in my career that I was offered a role on a show that I actually like and want to do.

Have you said publicly that you enjoyed the show?
I’m sure I’ve already tweeted about industry in the past because I have loved this show since it first aired. But I never interacted with the guys before.

Since when has the full-frontal technique been in use?
That was immediate. It was part of the original request. My first reaction was, “My nude photos have been floating around the internet since 2017.” I send pictures of my naked body. I don’t even use albums on Grindr right now. I don’t give a shit. I’m like, “Whatever, people have seen it and they’re going to keep seeing it and I work really hard to look like this and I don’t know how long I’m going to look like this.”

AAt the same time, even if your nude photos become public, only gay men will look at them.
Right, right.

DWould the wider audience influence your point of view?
I didn’t even think about that until photos leaked this week. They’re fully online.

These are probably still just gay men looking.
Yes. The entire HBO audience will now see my dick. That played a role on the day of shooting too, because it’s all well and good to say, “Anyway, if people really want to see my dick, they can easily find it online.” But that’s my hard dick too. With a flaccid penis, there are a lot of variables that come into play in front of a whole crew of people. As soon as you start thinking about the state of your flaccid penis, you’re stuck in that hole where it says: I have to stop thinking about it because the more I think about it, the worse it seems. I was definitely lost in thought.

I have to say, Harry has done Full Frontal before too, and I was so grateful to have him on set, and he was so lovely the whole 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 when it’s weird and uncomfortable. Even as a very sex-positive, free-spirited person, it’s just a very vulnerable thing.

Even if you are sex positive, you still exist in this culture.
I can’t really control what my dick looks like. I love my dick. I think I have a good dick. The reviews have mostly been good in my life. I’ve had a lot of sex. The thing is, I’m an Asian man and the biggest joke that’s made with Asian men is small dicks. And now I’m suddenly thinking: God, is it bigger or smaller than people thought? It’s just a part of the equation that I didn’t really grapple with or come to terms with until I was naked on set.

How did they tell you that this was necessary?
They said they highlighted it in the offer: “The role involves full nudity.” Honestly, I think that’s probably why they asked me. My closing joke in my Netflix special is about sex in a sauna. That’s part of my brand. They had a sauna scene and they went with someone they knew had experience and had been there.

What was it like to shoot such an erotically tense scene?
Our director (Zoé Wittock) was great. It’s a delicate thing because she tries to balance my own feelings on set and also approach it like a director would approach any other scene. The direction was very loose. For that scene, the direction was more about the reporting and the editing than about me and Harry. That was the last thing we shot. We had already developed a pretty good rapport and our chemistry was pretty good.

In this scene, you have to do something interesting, which is not necessarily proposition him, and later the audience has to wonder how things would have turned out if they had fucked.
I don’t actually know how they edited it. In the original script, it’s heavily implied that we may have gotten together.

Oh, interesting.
I know there was a discussion about it and they may have made it more ambiguous or more explicit that they haven’t done anything together. So I’m actually interested.

It occurred to me that that was the case, but it seemed more like Robert chose not to show his sexuality and that might have messed everything up. You haven’t gotten a screener yet?
I’ve seen little bits and pieces because I did ADR for the scene. I’ve seen this version of that scene. But I don’t know yet how the whole episode is edited together.

What did you want to convey about this character?
It’s a low-density, high-impact character. It even feels weird to talk about it now because I’m in an episode – I’m barely in the episode. The only thing that makes it kind of notable is that I’m naked in it.

I think the other reason that might have attracted them to casting me is the innate confidence of this character, which is something that I may have brought into my stand-up persona as well. This character in Industry, similar to my character in Fire Island and further Prey, is a much more confident guy than I am in real life. It’s nice to be an Asian man in a position of power. I just wanted to honor that.

Will you watch it with X?
I think I’ll sign off for today. I think I have a nice penis, but people will say what they say about my body, and a lot of that will have to do with what they think about me as a person. I would describe my penis as being in that borderline area between “objectively good” and “objectively bad” because, as I said, it’s flaccid. No one really has any idea what it actually looks like on the field.