For an actor who’s currently playing one of television’s most electrifyingly cutthroat characters, Ken Leung is refreshingly upbeat. As Eric Tao on HBO Max’s “Industry,” Leung has had a fitting vehicle for the volatility he’s so good at conveying in memorable roles from “Lost” to “Missing.” And in the show’s third season, he gets to fully descend into what Leung describes as Eric’s epic, high-decibel “midlife crisis” — just at the moment he’s being elevated to the highest peak of his career.
But in real life, Leung, who got his first film role as a steely antagonist in 1998’s “Rush Hour,” is a thoughtful Brooklyn dad who says he got into acting because it “gave me a safe space,” and who easily names “standing in front of the actual Millennium Falcon” as a career high. During our recent “Salon Talks” conversation, Leung opened up about being part of some of Hollywood’s most beloved franchises, working with the “incredibly diverse team” on “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and how representation has changed in his decades-long Hollywood career. “I think we’re finally in a place where we can start,” he says. “All possibilities are open to us now.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
We’ve been waiting for this season for two years. Eric is in a completely different place, he’s been through a lot of ups and downs. Tell me about where he is when we are reintroduced to him after this long hiatus.
When we first meet him way in the beginning, he’s this calm, collected, confident king of this world. But we see little cracks in that — the baseball bat. Something is threatening, something is missing. He seems very ready to take on a protege. Then in the second season, he goes through the series equivalent of a midlife crisis. He hooks up with an ex-girlfriend. He interviews, along with some colleagues, at other banks. He’s looking for a change. In season three, he finally makes partner, the seeming peak of his career. It comes a little late in his career, and it comes at great cost that we soon learn. His wife has left him. He has developed a drinking problem. He’s grappling with aging out of a young man’s game. So that’s where we meet him in season three, and he has no protege anymore. He’s starting from scratch in a very chaotic life transitional place.
In the first season of a new show, I imagine that the writing and the directing are based on the original conceptualization of the characters. Now, three seasons in, they are writing for you, they are developing these characters knowing how you can play them. How do you see the evolution of Eric in line with your evolution behind the scenes?
I feel like I asked for a season like this, because it’s one thing to play somebody who’s confident and is in control of everything. The next step that’s fun is to see how you lose control, partially because you’re not sure how that’s going to play out, so that’s a fun prospect to play. So I hoped for cracks, just to see how his suit of armor gets dismantled. What happens when
he doesn’t have a bat to wield around? Metaphorically, without the metaphorical bat, where is he? I don't know. That’s what I wanted to play, and that’s what we see in this season.
You've talked in the past about the role of improvisation in your cast, parallel with this very technical, precise financial language the show uses, where there's very little wiggle room. How do you juxtapose those two things, the play and the precision?
They’re separate things. As far as the precision, our creators are very accessible to us, and they’re constantly answering just the dumbest questions, the most elementary concepts for us. They’re always there, so we don’t have to rely on just ourselves. For the playing of a scene, it’s not a clinic on finance. You have to know what is happening in this scene. What are the stakes in the scene? Then beyond that, the terms, and the terminology, it’s not really an issue.
As far as the improvising, we’re playing people. Not only that, you’re in a business that is based on relationship building, so it makes sense that on a phone call, you're not always talking about finance, you’re reconnecting with a friend, you’re cracking jokes. In that sense, you can talk about anything. So those are kind of easy, and also helpful because you naturally loosen up when you can talk about anything you want, what’s on your mind that day. Things in your personal life can bleed into it. So they’re two different things that work well together.
Has there been a moment or a scene where somebody really threw you a curveball on this show?
Whenever I have to riff off finance, I’m incredibly thrown. As our props, we have a lot of financial papers on our desk. Some of them are real newspapers, so I’ll read a clip and then riff off that. That’s how I handle being thrown that way. But anytime it’s finance, I’m thrown.
This season, Kit Harington joins the cast, and his arc explores the idea of sustainable and environmental investing. There’s a lot of cynicism and skepticism around this topic in the show. How did you feel about approaching it, and what did you learn?
It seemed like a natural next thing. Season two is about the health space, and it was during COVID. I feel like our show is very topically reflective. It’s interesting with the whole green space thing. Pierpoint, Eric, this business, we only care about the good we’re doing as long as it positively affects our bottom line. We’re salespeople. So this is hot now, let’s sell this.
The thing I think is interesting about this season is that it’s almost like the gamble that Pierpoint takes on ethical investing is crystallized in the form of one man’s gamble in episode four with Rishi’s episode. I love that episode because it’s almost like the show as seen through the lens of one person, so it distills. One can take that episode and extrapolate it to the series. So it made sense to me, I saw it as another thing to sell.
Earlier this year, you were doing the live action version of “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” I heard that you didn’t know exactly what you were going up for.
I didn’t. I know that's the thing everyone talks about. But like a lot of projects these days, they deliberately keep it under wraps, so you’re told very little. All I knew was “Avatar,” and the low-hanging fruit of “Avatar” is the James Cameron “Avatar.” So I thought, “Is it that?” for a second. People have made it into something.
You have to translate this animated character, and you’re taking on a franchise that people feel very strongly about. What was it like coming into this? It’s not your first rodeo walking into a franchise that people love.
It is the first in terms of the makeup of the cast and a lot of people behind the camera. It was almost entirely Asian and First Nations, and it was just this incredibly diverse team. I’ve never been part of anything like that before. A lot of people I knew from other things, so that felt comfortable in a new way, like seeing familiar faces or people I’ve wanted to meet and never gotten to. Daniel Dae Kim, for years since “Lost” we were always like, “We should do something together.” Finally, we’re in something together.
As far as the "beloved" quality, I watched the animated thing just to see what I was getting into. The character in the animated series, my impression is that he’s drawn with very broad strokes, and it’s anyone’s guess how he got that way. I saw a lot of room to humanize him because it was kind of up to me how I did that, so that was fun.
Ken, you talk about being on a set, being part of a cast of Asian and indigenous people. I read an interview with you from about two years ago where you said, “When I started my career, I didn’t know if there was going to be a place for me as an Asian American actor.”
True. But, I also didn’t worry about it. I knew I needed to act. I knew it gave me something that I was missing in my upbringing. It gave me a safe space to investigate what this is. I wasn't practiced in that, and being able to do it in a pretend setting, it’s safe, you're given the words that you need to say. You can really look into, "What are feelings? What do I do with them in the presence of another person?" I think I needed that as a person. I didn’t really think about career longevity, I didn’t really have reason to anticipate anything long-term, but I also didn’t care. I know it’s going to benefit me for as long as it’ll have me, so that’s why I persevered in it.
And yet, you have lived through numerous decades now in this industry where things have changed. You’re a parent, you're looking at the characters your child is growing up watching. What do you think has shifted, and what do you think still needs to change in terms of casting, in terms of representation?
I think we’re finally in a place where we can start. It’s like you weren’t allowed in the room before, then you were allowed in the room, but we were still doing this stuff over here while you’re standing over there. Finally, we’re looking at you and we’re saying, “Hey, you’re in the room. Who are you?” It’s like anything is possible. What you want to share is, like I said, not anybody’s guess, but it’s up to you. It could be anything. So all possibilities are open to us now, and we can finally start. You can start being in the room instead of just being there physically or nominally.
Earlier you talked about your opening scene in this season of “Industry” where you are basically being coronated, you’ve arrived. Have you had a moment like that in your career where you thought, “Oh, this is it. This is different. Something shifted. I’m there”?
Maybe standing in front of the actual Millennium Falcon, just something you never dream about. I think it was that, and watching Han Solo and Leia share what turns out to be their final moments together, and being there for it. That’s from your childhood, so if that’s not an, “I’m there,” moment, “I'm here,” moment, I don’t know what is.
You play anger like nobody’s business. Your first film role in “Rush Hour,” you're an angry guy. You're doing anger now and it’s nearly 30 years later. What is different about playing that very masculine anger as a young person and revisiting it now as a less young person?
Well, for “Rush Hour,” I had this whole character history that was never part of the story. It was never going to be part of the story. It had to do with why my hair was bleached. Also, it was my first film and, as far as I knew, it was going to be my last film. I didn’t know. I couldn’t count on doing another one. So, with that history, I just threw everything into it in a kind of devil-may-care way. Now, it’s not so devil-may-care. The difference now is, I wouldn’t even call it anger anymore. I obviously know what you’re saying, but now it has layers of what that is about as far as who I’m playing, not so much anger as its own thing, but it’s more baked into how I build whoever I’m playing. It’s less devil-may-care. The older you get, the more you know what goes where.
You’ve been in some big, big franchises like “Star Wars,” “Avatar,” “Saw,” "Lost." You’re going to be in the "Joker' sequel. Is there a franchise that you still feel like, “This is the one I really want to do. I want to be a Ghostbuster, I want to be a Bond villain?”
It’s over now, but I loved “Breaking Bad.” I think it’s the greatest show ever.
You know the Vietnam Memorial? You go to the Vietnam Memorial and you see one name, two names, people who have died in the Vietnam War. Then you walk, and then you see a dozen names, and you keep walking. Before you know it, you’re surrounded by names. As far as in the context of a TV show, you start with nothing, one little thing, and you keep going. It’s the “before you know it” element.
It’s a lot like acting in my life. I just want to do it because it teaches me how to say hello, and I’m going to keep doing it. Then, before you know it, I can have a conversation with you now. I don’t know if I could have done this when I started. I’d have been all awkward, or not know what to say, or be conscious of not knowing what to say and then become a mess, like maybe a lot of us growing up. It’s given me this facility, and this self-possession.
