In this week's FRONTPAGE, we talk art, arancini and 'Industry' with actor Ken Leung .
Ken Leung insists he is nothing like Eric Tao, the domineering financier he plays on HBO’s Industry. Leung’s soft-spoken demeanor is certainly a disarming contrast from his onscreen persona, an alpha salesman who prowls the trading floor with a baseball bat. Still, the 55-year-old actor is wary of how often he remarks upon their differences.
When we meet over coffee and arancini, weeks after Industry’s third season finale, Leung exudes an intensity that is both unlike and uncannily reminiscent of Eric’s simmering volatility. “There may be a lot to Eric that’s very much like me,” Leung admits. “Maybe I’m refusing to see it.” His instinct to differentiate himself may be a mark of having so faithfully embodied Eric that Leung, like many great character actors, has become inseparable from his onscreen persona. Lately, the actor has been approached by a fair number of young men in finance, who talk to him as if they share an existing camaraderie.
Dressed in a black zip-up hoodie, gray slacks, and Cloud sneakers, Leung’s casual uniform leans more tech than finance bro. Still, seated across from him, I experience mild déjà vu — a flashback, I suppose, to the interview scene between Eric and his soon-to-be protégé Harper Stern (Myha’la) in Industry’s first episode. Eric eyes Harper’s résumé with amused interest before his tone abruptly shifts. He turns toward her, bluntly asking: “Why are you here, then?” Now, under Leung’s inquisitive gaze, I have the sense that I’m being interviewed — or rather, personally assessed — even though I am the one tasked with asking the questions.
Case in point: During a brief lull in conversation, Leung asks me, “Do you allow for the ‘I don’t know’ in your writing?”
“I think I have to,” I reply. “Or else it wouldn’t be honest.”
I’m relieved when he appears to nod approvingly.
***
Leung is fascinated by the unknown — specifically, what he doesn’t know. He admits this often: Uncertainty is part of the process. To that end, Leung performs best when he suspends his impulse to anticipate what may unfold. Certain creative choices, like determining how “a character moves through [him],” have come as a surprise to Leung on set. So has the resoundingly positive reception of Industry’s third season. With acting, he has always operated on the principle that he’s “lucky to be in it for a day” — even though Leung’s “day” in Hollywood has lasted for more than two decades. There have been moments when he was unsure whether another role, leading or supporting, would land in his lap.
Leung began acting on a whim in his twenties. While studying to be a physical therapist at NYU, he took an introductory acting class and realized it was his calling. “I knew I needed to act. I didn’t care how,” he says. “I never looked at it like a hustle.” The last thing he anticipated was turning this compulsion into a career. Neither did his parents, working-class Chinese immigrants who were perplexed by their eldest son’s newfound creative pursuit. Growing up, his mother worked at the Manhattan Savings Bank, and his father as a high school calculus teacher. Not only were Leung’s parents unfamiliar with what working in the arts entailed, they didn’t recognize acting as a legitimate job.
“I think my parents had this idea of what actors were from the Hong Kong tabloids,” Leung says. “It horrified them. They never saw it as work. It certainly isn’t stable work. They probably thought, ‘Surely, this wouldn’t last.’”
Leung got his start in New York’s downtown theater scene in the ’90s, where he appeared in indie productions like Jeff Weiss’ Hot Keys, a late-night serial with a script that changed every week; Alvin Eng’s The Goong Hay Kid, a punk-rap musical about a Chinese American rapper; Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, a modern-day dramatization of Jesus’ relationship with the Apostles; and Ralph B. Peña’s Flipzoids, a play about intergenerational Filipino American identity.
Flipzoids (1996) was an especially formative role for Leung, who starred in the three-person production alongside two established actresses, Ching Valdes-Aran and Mia Katigbak. Leung was the youngest performer and not ethnically Filipino, but the play’s focus on identity, belonging, and differing generational attitudes resonated with his family background. “I was a kid when I got the part, but I felt very trusted to act alongside these two giants,” Leung says. “It was like I accidentally skipped a few steps to be on that stage.”
From Flipzoids, Leung jumped to the big screen. He would return to the NYC stage for a few more productions (most recently in Will Arbery’s 2022 Evanston Salt Costs Climbing), but Leung’s 1998 film role as the bleach-blonde villain in Rush Hour, opposite Jackie Chan, abruptly inducted him into Hollywood’s rarified ranks. He went on to appear in films by Steven Spielberg (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), Edward Norton (Keeping the Faith), Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), and Spike Lee (Sucker Free City), even cinching small parts in the X-Men and Star Wars franchises. But ultimately, it was television that gave Leung the space to shine. He was brought onto Lost as a series regular after a one-episode guest spot on The Sopranos landed him on the creators’ radar.
Leung’s singular screen presence, coupled with his willingness to inhabit a range of roles, has cemented his reputation as an unforgettable scene-stealer. (His fleeting performance as Carter Chong on The Sopranos is so memorable that some fans mistakenly think he’s featured in more than one episode.) Still, the veteran actor is wary of becoming too associated with such quirky supporting roles, a niche he became even more associated with after his bit part in Keeping the Faith (2000) as a crassly jovial karaoke salesman. “For a creative business, [actors] can get so easily siloed into the box that people put [them] into,” he says. In scripts, Leung routinely encounters Asian male character tropes of all kinds, from “the inexplicable psychopath” to the shy lab technician to the funny foreigner.
But Industry was a turning point for Leung. The show presented him with a psychically complex, layered character to showcase his range. The gruff, watchful mentor that Harper reveres in season one reveals his ruthless edge by season three. But as Eric’s tough-guy façade is chipped away, Leung plumbs the character’s cruel and pitiful depths, giving dimension to his faults and failures. It’s no surprise that all signs point to Industry as Leung’s breakthrough moment — a transition from the periphery to the spotlight.
If we’re being honest, Leung says, he doesn’t quite know what to make of that.
***
Leung sleeps for about five hours a night, maybe less. He prefers to wake around 4 a.m. and dwell in “the quiet of the middle of the night.” There’s a clarity to this hour that he treasures. “Do you know the German word heiligenschein?” he asks after I mention the word schadenfreude. “It’s this moment in the morning when the dew hits the grass, and your shadow is cast onto the grass. Because of the dew, there’s a halo around the shadow of your head.” In an ideal world, Leung jokes, he would begin his day with heiligenschein. His typical morning routine consists of answering emails, walking his nine-year-old son to the bus, and preparing for projects. At the time of our interview, he was gearing up for an independent film that began shooting in January.
This early morning calm is a sharp contrast to the chaos of Leung’s early acting life. Back then, performing in plays meant juggling a string of day jobs to make ends meet. In his mid-twenties, one such job placed him in a research lab at The Rockefeller University under the supervision of Mary Jeanne Kreek, a trailblazer in the field of opiate addiction. “I worked under Kreek's administrative assistant, so I was the assistant’s assistant,” Leung says. “She would talk out her grant proposals, and I would transcribe it. I remember that job very clearly because it was very hard. She talks very fast. There was a lot of science language that I didn’t catch all the time. One time, she looked at my transcripts and was like, ‘What is this? This makes no sense!’ I got really upset.”
A few years later, he began assisting Jadin Wong, a pioneering actress who performed at Forbidden City in San Francisco, a Chinese nightclub and cabaret that was run and staffed by Asian American performers. Wong knew almost every Asian American in the performing arts community and ran a talent management agency out of her 57th Street apartment, Leung recalls. When her assistant died in the ’90s, Leung stepped in. “I’d send actors out for auditions, take calls, talk to casting people. I was always in her house.”
Leung’s career has been buoyed by unexpected opportunities and personal connections, to such an extent that he’s managed to operate without a publicity team for decades. This past September, Leung signed with the talent agency Paradigm and hired his first publicist. Despite the development, Leung admits he’s never really thought about what it would feel like to “make it” in the industry. He’s never needed anyone’s permission or validation to act — he just needed to be booked. But as of late, Leung has been taking a lot of meetings. “People are meeting just to meet, which has never happened before,” he says. “They want to know what I’m interested in. I didn’t know that side of acting existed until now.”
***
We’re walking to the International Center of Photography in Lower Manhattan for an exhibit on global street photography. The neighborhood is familiar territory for Leung, who was born and raised nearby in Two Bridges before his family decamped to Midwood, Brooklyn, when he was nine. Among the works on display are several photographs by Corky Lee, the renowned Chinese American photographer and activist, which Leung is particularly eager to see. On the way over, Leung tells me about one of Lee’s most ambitious projects, a recreation of a historic 1869 image marking the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The original photo famously excluded the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers who worked on the tracks. In response, Lee made his own rendition of the image featuring over 200 Asian Americans at the same location, their collective presence challenging their historical erasure.
Lee is an apt figure to mention, even if his documentary work, which is rooted in reality, exists in contrast to the fictional drama of acting. Despite their differing roles in front of and behind the camera, I see both Leung and Lee as image-makers. Both use their craft to imbue ordinary scenes or situations with meaning, to inscribe a narrative upon people, real and fictional, who’ve often been denied that dignity.
**
Leung offers me a cigarette. As we light up, I’m reminded of a scene from season one of Industry. Eric has just learned that Harper is a college dropout. On their smoke break, he launches into an impassioned speech about their odds of simply being at the investment bank Pierpoint — two people “born at the bottom,” ethnic minorities from working-class families who have had to chart their own paths. “We intimidate people here,” Eric says. “Why is that? Because hunger is not a birthright.”
There’s a surprising tenderness to Leung’s line delivery, which makes the scene feel distinctly raw. The subtext, of course, extends beyond Pierpoint, deriving its force from Leung’s history. Eric’s ambition manifests as a belligerent hunger, whereas Leung’s drive is self-possessed and palpable, especially when he talks about acting. “If I never got a callback, I’d probably be acting in a closet somewhere,” he says. “But I always try to come to a role from a human place. Something in me is going to touch something in you, if you allow it to.”
As we weave through the exhibit, Leung lingers on certain images: a Greek landscape that reminds him of his role in Evanston Salt, a rag-tag group of boys surrounding and flipping off a camera, and Lee’s harrowing photo of a bleeding Asian protester roughly escorted by the NYPD. We pause before a photo of five young boys in a cement playground. Four are seated on a bench, while one leans against a small bicycle. Behind them is a sky-blue wall, illustrated with abstract white shapes resembling flowers and clouds, that blends into the sky above. The boys are fixated on a remote-controlled toy car in the foreground.
A photo can arrest a viewer’s attention and evoke something immediate — joy, shock, or surprise. An actor’s performance, on the other hand, is a slower burn — it requires prolonged participation from the audience, a willingness to believe and inhabit a fictional world and its characters. Leung is drawn to such exchanges of expressive reciprocity, naturally oscillating between the mundane and profound in conversation.
In one instance, Leung recalls an old adage often attributed to Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” It’s a fitting sentiment from an actor who takes on distinct roles, especially those at odds with his own personality, to uncover a deeper truth about himself. I try to elaborate on the metaphor — “So art is kind of like a two-sided coin…” — to no avail.
Leung encourages me to finish the thought, and in a pure moment of synchronicity, we complete it together. “You’re saying the truth can also be a lie,” he says, and I respond: “Or a lie can also be a truth.”
