Industry’s creators admit that they slept on scene-stealer Ken Leung and his star-making turn as aggro banker Eric Tao. “We didn’t write enough for him in season one,” cocreator Konrad Kay says, before assuring me that he and Mickey Down are not the type of lads to make the same mistake twice. “We were like, Fuck, we have him again? We need to write a full-blown story. We have to break perspective. We had this joke in season one that Eric would just walk into a scene, say something, and then walk out of the scene. But in season two, we were like, Well, who is this guy?”

In Industry season two’s fourth episode, “There Are Some Women…,” we find out. After losing his biggest client thanks to a backstabbing move by Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), his own protégé, Eric absconds to Pierpont & Co. headquarters in New York for an impromptu meeting with his boss, Bill Adler (Trevor White), in a last-ditch effort to save his job. While there, he confronts ghosts from his past—like the memory of his own recently deceased mentor—as he fights for his life at the bank.

“The main thing is that he wants to talk to Bill face-to-face,” Leung says. “That is his strength: His power comes from his relationships. Relationships built over years.” But in a face-to-face Zoom call, Leung comes across stoic and zen, quite the opposite of the hot-tempered banker he plays. “I think a lot of it came from his mentor,” Leung says about Eric’s overly aggressive nature. “His mentor gave him a way of being that works for him.”

While that may be working for Eric, it’s no longer working for the firm—and Eric knows it. Eric’s Hail Mary trip across the Atlantic, Leung says, is “a show of great desperation” from a man who feels he has everything to lose. “He’s gonna do whatever it takes. Nobody’s invited him. He’s just gonna take the baseball bat and take his swing.”

Baseball bats, coincidentally enough, are an important part of Eric Tao for Leung. Eric can often be found wielding one as he paces the trading floor or barks orders from his desk. “I always thought the baseball bat is kind of intimidating and just wrong to carry around. But you don’t carry a baseball bat unless you feel threatened, unless you need to protect yourself from something, unless you are in trouble,” Leung says. “On the outside, it looks like a picture of power. But it’s so blatant that it must speak to something he’s hiding or reconciling within himself.”

The specific bat he chooses to wield is another clue into Eric’s psyche. “I wanted [a bat] that if you hit something, it could break,” Leung says. Ultimately, he landed on a brown wooden one. “All the other bats were, like, aluminum or whatever. They didn’t break. But a wooden baseball bat is almost like a metaphor for Eric. The harder you hit, the more chance that you will break.”

“Why do you have to have it?” he wonders. “What are you afraid of? What are you trying to get in front of?”

It’s clear by episode four what Eric should be afraid of: his own mentees. Over the course of the season, Harper and his other former protégé, “New York by way of New Haven” hotshot Danny Van Deventer (Alex Alomar Akpobome), have begun outpacing him at the firm. “I have a friend in finance, and he’s like, ‘This rings really true,’” says Leung. He notes that his friend was actually told by his boss, “I want to train you such that you can replace me.” Eric, however, is not as ready to be replaced.

Leung, though, isn’t threatened by his younger Industry costars. He’s got a great rapport with them, especially his most frequent scene partner, Herrold. “I feel very safe with her, and it happened from the first moment,” Leung says. “The first time we met was the first day we worked. When you watch episode one, season one, that first interview, it was hours after me and Myha’la had actually met.” Despite that relatively short on-ramp, their chemistry was natural and immediate, Leung says. “Some people you meet and you feel something, like you’ve known each other all your life. You know, that sort of thing,” he says. Their bond is so tight that Leung tells me that they unwittingly ended up moving into apartments just a few blocks from each other during the pandemic.

“It’s almost like we’re friends,” Leung says, before catching himself. “That’s a funny thing to say, but it’s almost like we were friends. That’s what I mean.”

While his relationship with Herrold is solid in real life, their power struggle is the driving engine of Industry. “We dug into Harper and Eric’s relationship in the writers room, and we were like, What is it about?” Kay says about writing season two. “It’s okay for it to be this, like, ineffable thing that we can’t quite put our fingers on. But ultimately, the way we figured it—and it helped us write it—was, one of them is the old cowboy who’s been on all the posters, done all the stuff. One of them is the young cowboy who has read all the books about the old cowboy and wants to be the old cowboy. Eventually, the world isn’t—to use that cliché—it’s not big enough for both of them.”

Hence, the trip to New York—Eric’s last stand. But Eric is not only fighting the present danger presented by new kids on the block Harper and Danny. He’s also struggling over a past he has yet to fully reckon with.

In conceiving Eric’s beefed-up arc for season two, Kay and Down hearkened back to a monologue Leung delivered in episode four of season one, in which Eric shared that his mentor, whom he admired, often called him racist slurs. “We went back and we thought about that monologue he tells about his own mentor and were like, Okay, this is a guy who’s obviously come up in a certain time. He’s Asian American. He had this white boss. He would’ve experienced all of this racism. He would’ve had to really prove himself.”

Eric’s New York trip is haunted by relics of this unsettled past, from finding a “Make America Great Again” hat in his late mentor’s office to having to beg for a job from Bill to sleeping with his mentor’s widow. “I think he doesn’t allow himself to look backwards so much,” Leung says. “Which is why when he goes to New York, and New York equals the past, he is kind of different. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. We see him tossing in bed. We see him polishing his shoes like he’s about to go to war.”

Unfortunately, he loses. In his attempt to keep his job, Eric offers Danny up as a sacrificial lamb. But in classic Industry fashion, it’s then revealed that Danny has been one step ahead of Eric the whole time, having already orchestrated Eric’s exit from the trading floor via a “promotion” to the cushy client services division. Eric has taken a big swing and struck out.

While the outcome isn’t what Eric wanted, it’s what Leung wanted for Eric. “I personally hoped for that,” he says. “You establish a place of power, and if you stay there, it doesn’t go anywhere. You need to fall from that to find out who you are. Every time you have a character in a situation where you’re like, I don’t know how he’s gonna go through that, that is fun stuff for acting.”

Down and Kay can’t think of an actor better equipped to take on this tragic arc than Leung. “[Eric] doesn’t know what to do with the idea that his best days are behind him. His story is kind of about a guy wrestling with the fact that he’s going to die,” Kay says. “Because we had Ken and we knew he could pull it off, we really dug into that stuff.”

“Me and Mickey think Ken is one of the great actors of his generation, 100%,” he continues. “He has a movie star charisma. He’s out of this world.”

Rest assured, all of Down and Kay’s praise hasn’t gone to Leung’s head. “As an Asian American actor, I never really had a reason to expect a career,” Leung tells me. “I am proud to say I’ve kept that feeling of ‘every job could be my last job.’ Every gig is such a gift. I remind myself of that all the time. I feel a youth in it despite my years in it. I still get really excited when I walk down the streets in New York City and I see the ‘no parking’ sign because something is about to be shot there. I still feel butterflies.”