Ken Leung on his Industry role: "It's so ironic that I have to go to the UK to find an Asian-American character worth playing"

GQ

The Lost and The Sopranos vet "has range: he can be the bad guy or the supportive sidekick, the unpredictable livewire or the calming presence," says Frazier Tharpe, who interviewed Leung for GQ. "On Industry, his character Eric, a managing director at the show’s fictional bank Pierpoint, is all of those things at once, and sometimes even paternal—serving as both mentor and antagonist to Harper, the show’s ostensible protagonist." How did Leung get involved in Industry? "When it's pilot season, you get a bunch of projects, one after another, and this one struck me in that it's a rare thing to find a character that's written as an Asian-American character, who was as interesting as this character was. I was like, 'It's so ironic that I have to go to the UK to find an Asian-American character worth playing,'" says Leung. "I understood the character right off the bat. I'm not a finance guy. I didn't know the lingo and stuff. But that didn't seem like the thrust of it, for me. He was coming from a place that he had a gravity about him that I was curious about. And it was written such that you're like, 'This is written from lived experience,' in that you would never mistake a script from this show with any other show. It's a very specific type of writing, beyond the language. And when I met the two creators—one was a trader, one worked in mergers and acquisitions. Even if it's unfamiliar to you, they know intimately what they're talking about. So it created a safety net, where you could ask as many dumb questions as you needed to, and it gave a freedom to (the work). And then add to that Lena Dunham, who had this very gentle hand. She created this environment where you felt free to just try things. Do a take just to try to make Lena laugh, or something. So that turned something that potentially was, 'How am I going to wrap my head around this world that I know nothing about?' and made it fun." ALSO: Leung was told the reason his character is Asian-American is because he's based on a real person.