For an actor who’s currently playing one of television’s most electrifyingly cutthroat characters, Ken Leung is refreshingly upbeat. As Eric Tao on HBO Max’s “Industry,” Leung has had a fitting vehicle for the volatility he’s so good at conveying in memorable roles from “Lost” to “Missing.” And in the show’s third season, he gets to fully descend into what Leung describes as Eric’s epic, high-decibel “midlife crisis” — just at the moment he’s being elevated to the highest peak of his career.

But in real life, Leung, who got his first film role as a steely antagonist in 1998’s “Rush Hour,” is a thoughtful Brooklyn dad who says he got into acting because it “gave me a safe space,” and who easily names “standing in front of the actual Millennium Falcon” as a career high. During our recent “Salon Talks” conversation, Leung opened up about being part of some of Hollywood’s most beloved franchises, working with the “incredibly diverse team” on “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and how representation has changed in his decades-long Hollywood career. “I think we’re finally in a place where we can start,” he says. “All possibilities are open to us now.”

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

We’ve been waiting for this season for two years. Eric is in a completely different place, he’s been through a lot of ups and downs. Tell me about where he is when we are reintroduced to him after this long hiatus.

When we first meet him way in the beginning, he’s this calm, collected, confident king of this world. But we see little cracks in that — the baseball bat. Something is threatening, something is missing. He seems very ready to take on a protege. Then in the second season, he goes through the series equivalent of a midlife crisis. He hooks up with an ex-girlfriend. He interviews, along with some colleagues, at other banks. He’s looking for a change. In season three, he finally makes partner, the seeming peak of his career. It comes a little late in his career, and it comes at great cost that we soon learn. His wife has left him. He has developed a drinking problem. He’s grappling with aging out of a young man’s game. So that’s where we meet him in season three, and he has no protege anymore. He’s starting from scratch in a very chaotic life transitional place.

In the first season of a new show, I imagine that the writing and the directing are based on the original conceptualization of the characters. Now, three seasons in, they are writing for you, they are developing these characters knowing how you can play them. How do you see the evolution of Eric in line with your evolution behind the scenes?

I feel like I asked for a season like this, because it’s one thing to play somebody who’s confident and is in control of everything. The next step that’s fun is to see how you lose control, partially because you’re not sure how that’s going to play out, so that’s a fun prospect to play. So I hoped for cracks, just to see how his suit of armor gets dismantled. What happens when

"Whenever I have to riff off finance, I’m incredibly thrown."

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