‘Industry’s’ Ken Leung on growing up in Chinatown and learning to speak finance

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Ken Leung has waited three decades to be a breakout star.

After decades of success as a character actor on shows like “Lost” and “The Sopranos,” Ken Leung’s career has taken a star turn with his lead role on HBO's “Industry."

So “Industry” has taken off this season, and gotten a much bigger audience. Does that change your life in New York when you're here? And at some point I made a shift that was like: Eric is coming from a place of power and confidence and his own made-up reality. He knows what he wants to know, and doesn’t what he doesn’t.So we're fortunate enough – and I mean just unbelievably fortunate – to send our son to an independent school. They are crazy expensive. Consequently, a lot of our fellow parents are in finance.

I remember during the blackout in '77, my dad and I were sitting on our fire escape playing “I Spy.” And the fallout shelter sign on the housing projects here, I remember that being one of the things I spied. That was the '70s. There were gangs in Chinatown, and movie theaters, none of which survive today.Chinese gangs. The Pagoda Theater was two blocks down. I remember one night they had a live variety show visiting from mainland China, different acts one after the other.

I was so scared that I didn't know what to say, I didn't say anything. And they just concluded that I couldn't speak Chinese, and then suddenly they changed. They had no use for me, they were like “Oh, so sorry, you can go. Go on your way.” I think they wanted me to be their sherpa. Completely. Yes. Just doing the math, I figure Eric's parents lived through the Cultural Revolution in China, and maybe they escaped that and ended up here because of that. And that they brought with them a kind of protective, distrustful-of-authority personality. And he grew up with this kind of inward-turning hidden DNA.

 

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