Eric Tao has been lying in wait and on last week’s episode of HBO’s “Industry,” entitled “Useful Idiot,” he finally got his moment. All season, Eric, played with thrilling spontaneity by Ken Leung, has watched as his former hire turned boss, Bill Adler, faced physical and existential crisis, holding steady for the chance to capitalize on his misfortune. This came in the form of multiple “Margin Call”-esque pressure-cooker scenes that saw Bill’s power at Pierpoint hang in the balance. Ultimately, it was Eric’s sly maneuvering that dealt Bill his fatal blow, an act Leung believes took root earlier in the season, when Bill revealed to Eric his cancer diagnosis.
“It hasn’t been beyond him to store information to weaponize later. Harper’s forged transcripts, and now Bill’s brain tumor. I think the idea doesn’t really coalesce until that scene in the bathroom when he spots the error in the book that they’re about to present to Mitsubishi. But his wheels are always turning,” said Leung in a recent interview with GQ. “I think more broadly speaking, in Episode 1, there’s that moment where Bill kind of intimates that Eric can’t really manage. And the reality is that Eric hired Bill in the beginning, so I think that kind of reminds Eric of the culture that he’s in. Everything is always stacked against him, this discriminatory culture where to succeed you not only have to be cutthroat, but you have to do it in this white patriarchy, and class divisions, where the system is unfair.”
In crafting his performance, Leung tried to relate Eric’s personal and professional complexities to his own background, coming from Chinese immigrant parents.
“I think he must have come from a place of having to prove himself that must have originated in some inferiority. I was talking to somebody else about this: in building the character, I thought a lot about his parents and where he came from, how he evolved into this kind of person,” Leung said. “Just doing the math, I think his parents must have lived through — you know, he has Chinese immigrant parents — they must have lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. And one of the main things that happened during the Cultural Revolution was that certain classes of people — intellectuals, people with money, people with land — were sort of coaxed into, for the first time in their lives, telling the truth. ‘What are your real feelings about the government, how we’re doing things? It’s a safe space. You can finally unload all your secret beliefs.’ And once they did that, they were persecuted for it.”
Leung went on to explain how this led to a “cultural distrust of authority,” one that carries over to how Eric handles himself at Pierpoint. Some may even say this distrust has mutated into a ruthlessness that leaves him an island of one.
“For him to make it in finance, in this world that was not built for him, it made sense to me, in that context, that he would become this kind of monster. That he would react to that cultural turning inward by not only making his presence known, but doing it violently — you know, he carries a baseball bat around, famously — doing it blatantly, and violently, and domineeringly,” said Leung to GQ. “So I think he’s always coming from this fighting against his DNA, which is a DNA that is about hiding, and keeping your thoughts to yourself, and not being in a safe space. I think in his mind, he’s never in a safe space, and so he’s always on the lookout for opportunities.”
Thankfully we’ll get to keep seeing Eric seize opportunity — hopefully in continued cutthroat fashion — as “Industry” was recently renewed for Season 4.
The season three finale of “Industry” airs on HBO Sunday at 10pm and streams on Max at the same time.
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