ERIC TAO IS fighting for his soul on HBO’s Industry. The show’s third season has been rough for the otherwise steely and focused man, with his life spiraling out of control in the wake of a divorce and his firing of protege Harper (Myha’la). Despite a big time promotion, Eric’s found himself at the bottom of another ladder, with no clear idea of what it takes to climb the rungs back up to power.
That shifts in season 3’s seventh and penultimate episode, “Useful Idiot.” With Pierpoint on life support, the bank must work to secure a capital injection if it wants to stay alive, and Eric quickly finds himself stuck between helping his friend, Bill Adler (Trevor White), or ascending further in the company. Eric—to borrow a tactic from another HBO character—realizes chaos is a ladder, and bends the situation to his will by leveraging Adler’s brain tumor to oust him from Pierpoint, securing a place for him in the bank’s new future in the process. It’s 12 Angry Men meets Boiler Room and is, as it’s gone with every week throughout this third season, another standout moment for the series.
It’s also a pivotal episode for Ken Leung, whose performance as Eric is consistently superlative but who has elevated his work to new heights this year. “Useful Idiot” features all the hallmarks of what makes Leung great: a focused interiority and calculating presence that’s made him one of the show’s most compelling characters. It also marks a comeback for Eric, who finds his power once again.
In the wake of “Useful Idiot,” Leung sat down with Men’s Health for a wide-ranging conversation about his process, working with co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay as the two stepped into the director’s chair for the first time, whether or not he sees Eric’s decision to betray Adler as saving him, and much more.
MEN’S HEALTH: In a series, you have the opportunity to repeatedly revisit a character. Does what you do with Eric shift from season to season, depending on what you’re told ahead of time?
KEN LEUNG: I purposefully don’t ask for a lot of information. I like to go in as blind as possible, because I try to maximize spontaneity and self-surprise. Every time we start a new season, I remind myself what just happened. I ask very basic questions: ‘How much time has passed, and what are the basic things that have happened?” Then I go off and let that percolate. But beyond that, I like to keep myself on my toes.
I have an overactive mind. This is true for lots of people; I’m not unique in this way. Anyone who’s gone through any kind of life trauma may develop a thing of looking out for danger, even when there’s no threat present. My mind does that all the time. I’ve become acquainted with how that works. I very carefully withhold information from myself so that I can learn it, so I don’t have time to overthink things, and I can be as loose as I can.
I approach Eric like that. I know the kind of person he is, the kind of thinker he is. I reconnect to that, and the rest I approach as it comes. Obviously, with all the financial stuff, if I have questions about this concept or that term, the boys, [co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay], are very accessible. I’m not afraid to ask just the most mundane, stupid questions. They don’t hold back on telling me too much, so I don’t have to worry about that part of it. Really, the bulk of the prep and the building of Eric came with season 1. After that, it’s a matter of touching base with some of the milestones that have happened, and the rest is letting it fly.
MH: It’s like putting on an old pair of shoes at that point.
KL: Kind of! It’s funny you say that, because I personally own a single suit that I bought 25 years ago—something like that. So, every time I put on the costume for Eric—even though it’s just a suit, it’s nothing extraordinary—to me, it’s not a thing I usually wear. So, it immediately informs the way you hold yourself and move. The costume does a lot for that.
MH: What did Mickey and Konrad bring as first-time directors? They’re pretty hands-on generally, but was it nice to have them there directly?
KL: From five years of knowing me and watching how I work, they’re very quick to modulate their directing style. I think I’m very easy to direct, and also kind of difficult, because it’s very easy to tell me too much. I need to translate it into actable terms, to break up a scene into ‘What am I trying to do right now?’
To know too much backstory or what is going to happen later… too much information doesn’t really work for me. I think they sense that, and would give me very actable things to do. Which, I have to say, is true overall for Industry. All our directors have given me very actable direction.
MH: Can you share an example of what that looks like?
KL: The thing that comes to mind is the moment I betray Bill, and lead him out of the room. When we pick up, we’re in the conference room, and we’re all dealing with the fallout of that, the aftermath of, ‘Are we cool with what just happened and how it happened?’ The script had us kind of laughing about it, lightening it up so that we can continue with the emergency situation we’re still in. We had too much of a good time with that; it was almost belittling Bill and his illness.
It’s a funny thing when you’re asked to make light of something. You don’t want to pretend it’s light, so you want to find ways to tickle each other. We did that a little too much. The direction was as simple as, ‘It’s more serious than that. Don’t be laughing over this like it’s a joke or something.’ That’s all it takes, and then we all adjust.
MH: You’ve mentioned in the past that Eric creates his own reality. Throughout most of the season, Eric has been in a place where he’s not really been able to do that. In fact, he’s acting like a grad more so than the Eric of old. What do you think forces him out of that mentality, and into a position where he’s able to create that reality for himself once again in this episode?
KL: The reality he creates morphs. In his mind, he fired Harper to save her, to get her out of trouble for insider trading. But then, something like eight months pass since then, and suddenly she’s in his mind. She’s still in the business when I thought she would not be. In my mind, in Eric’s mind, she’s coming after him. She is now the beast that he created. He calls her a wrecking ball and all this stuff. I think his sense of reality—the reality he creates—takes over, morphs, and convinces him he’s in trouble more than he may be. Towards the end, he claws his way back to what worked. He finds out that that doesn’t work, to have the reality control you. That’s what it’s become. He finds his way out of that by the end.
MH: The quote from this episode that stood out to me was, “Let’s not sell our soul just because there’s a gun to our temple.” Do you think Eric sold his soul for this outcome? Or was it, ‘I see an advantage to climb this ladder that I have been trying to figure out how to climb all season, and this is a chance for me to take it?’
KL: Both are true. He has sold his soul to a degree. Bill was his only real friend in the company after he lost Newman. The whole season, he has this, ‘I’ve achieved this in my career. I’ve made partner finally, but it’s cost me this in my personal life’ thing.
With Bill at the end, it means this to betray him as far as my career, but it means this in my personal life, as far as my friendship. So in that, one can say he’s sold his soul by choosing one over the other. It does track [LAUGHS] as far as how Eric has behaved. He’s always chosen what works. As far as the bottom line, his career—he’s always chosen that. We see the destruction it’s caused on his family, [and] all his personal relationships. If selling your soul means choosing the bottom line over your heart, then for sure.
MH: In the same way that Eric views ousting Harper as saving her soul, do you think there’s any element of that in what he does to Bill?
KL: That’s an amazing question! No one has remotely asked something like that. That’s great. There’s a moment when Bill invites me to his house and we’re sharing a cigar. It’s that moment where I say, where I say, ‘You should stay home. You should be with your family at a time like this, you should forget about Pierpoint. This is different; you don’t have much time left.’ It’s in line with this choice—it’s just Bill happens to be in a place where doesn’t have the luxury of choosing one or the other. There’s nowhere in [Eric’s] mind that both are compatible. So for him, it is a matter of choice, and he thinks Bill should choose.
I think, if that can be called compassion . . . it happens to be a thing that would serve him. So, it’s a fine line to say how compassionate that is. He certainly knows how to present it compassionately. It’s hard to say where he is inside.
MH: There’s a standout moment in episode 2 where after you get off the phone with Harper, you glance over to where her desk was. It’s very subtle. Was that something you did naturalistically, or was that scripted? It speaks so much to the ghostly presence that hangs over Eric, in regards to their relationship.
KL: I didn’t plan it, and I don’t think it was in the script. From day one, stepping on set without Myha’la there—it was weird. My whole life on this series has been really with her. She was just not there, physically. She was always there, always this haunting presence. Like I said, to the point of morphing in my mind, she’s become this evil danger that she never was.
That’s the beautiful thing about Industry. There’s no, ‘The script says this, so we need to execute this or that.’ It’s written and directed with a looseness such that we can find those things in one take and then try something different in the next take. I, obviously, never know what take they’re going to use, so I actually don’t remember looking or anything like that. But I’m sure it wasn’t articulated.
MH: Between the “relentless” moment between Eric and Robert (Harry Lawtey), and even Diana’s comment to Rishi [in season 3, episode 4, “White Mischief”] about how it’s easier to raise strong boys than fixing broken men, what do you think the show is trying to say about masculinity at this point?
KL: That anger and hatred and that type of masculine energy is safe. Sadness and making a reckoning with how you’ve done things up to the point where they don’t work anymore—that vulnerability is not safe. The thing about this business is that the anger and the safe stuff is how you get power. The problem—and maybe this is what the show is commenting on, subconsciously—is that type of power, gotten that way [and] based on safe things, can become uncontrollable, can take on a life of its own, and then suddenly it’s a horse before the cart sort of thing. Suddenly it’s controlling you. I don’t know that this is a conscious commentary the show is trying to make, but maybe subconsciously, the message is to be wary of safeness—because it can actually take over.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
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