Ken Leung Built His ‘Industry’ Character From the Outside Looking In: ‘We’re Trying to Carve Our Place in This World That Is Not for Us’

By Carole Horst

Carole Horst

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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.

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