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.’”
