The main characters on HBO’s “Industry” — Harper (Myha’la), Eric (Ken Leung), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), Rishi (Sagar Radia) and even Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) — are a band of outsiders in the conservative (e.g. white man’s world) of finance. A Black American woman, a Chinese-American man, a media heiress of Lebanese descent, a South Asian bro and a striking blonde whose side hustle includes sex-positive social media posts — these are not the folks who could break the glass ceiling in a tony London brokerage, where social class, the right accents and the right schools still matter. This was key to Leung as he approached Eric.

“We’re trying to kind of carve our place in this world that is not for us, right?” he says. “The first step was to take an ownership of the role, because it’s set in the world of finance — a world that I didn’t know anything about. So, it was very easy to make that comparison to a world that wasn’t designed for me.”
Showrunners and creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay had come from that world, which makes the show very specific and the characters very universal. The carpet on the trading floor in Season 1 was red, which Leung remembers helped build the character.

“For Chinese people, red is a lucky color, and in my case, it was also a family color. Our actual carpeting at home was red, our first family car was red, our house was red,” he says. “So, I was like, this is home. I belong here. That was the first block, to take away all the trappings of ‘You don’t belong,’ and say, ‘No one belongs here more than me.’”

He credits his chemistry with Myha’la as his second building block. “I was just lucky that it was Myha’la. It almost felt like we knew each other before,” he adds.

Over three seasons, they had built up a toxic, mentor-mentee, quasi father-daughter relationship. But Season 4 opens with a changed dynamic: Eric had been cast aside into a gilded, boring retirement. That is, until Harper needs him. He returns to London and together, they launch venture SternTao and get to work. This time, they are equals.

“The interesting thing about Season 4 is that I need her more than she needs me,” Leung says. Indeed, her surname is first in the new firm.

Eric needs to get back to a relationship with his kids, too.

Leung says a cut scene — in which he calls his teenage daughter at school in the U.K. right after speaking to Harper — helped build his character’s journey to atonement and enlightenment.
“When he shows up [in London] to start this enterprise with Harper, this conscious part is, yes, we’re back in business. We can make this work. The unconscious part is that she understands me. Maybe through her, I can learn how to reach my daughter,” says Leung. “Harper has excelled in a way that mirrors me. She is the answer. That’s why we see him treat Harper over this season in a very fatherly way. That never was the case before.”

His new life, however, explodes because he can’t control his old impulses, giving Leung the chance to really hit rock bottom emotionally and allow Eric to finally do the right thing: Sign SternTao entirely over to Harper. Leung says it’s an emotional goodbye, made doubly so by the fact that he and Myha’la have worked together so closely for six years, and actors often don’t get that kind opportunity to cap an onscreen relationship.

“It’s not the kind of scene where you say, ‘Well, this is going to be played this way, so let’s just go in and do that,’” he explains, “You prepare yourself to be as supple as possible, and then, let it play.”