Ken Leung

His single episode on The Sopranos in 2007 as a psychiatric patient who attacks Uncle Junior happened to air while Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were assembling Lost's fourth season. They cast him the next day as Miles Straume, a sarcastic ghost-talker, and have said they would have rewritten the character entirely rather than cast someone else. The audition used a decoy scene to prevent spoiler leaks. Before that, Brett Ratner had put him in Rush Hour (1998) as Sang, the chief henchman opposite Jackie Chan, and called him 'equivalent to Philip Seymour Hoffman as far as talent is concerned.'

Industry on HBO gave him the role he'd been owed for decades. As Eric Tao, a volatile managing director at a London investment bank, he's the show's live wire, the one you can't look away from even when the rest of the scene is good. The Ringer ran a profile in August 2022 titled 'Ken Leung's Stock Is at an All-Time High,' which about covers it. The show's creators have called him 'one of the great actors of his generation, 100%.' Edward Norton said something close back in 2000 when he cast Leung in Keeping the Faith and noted nobody had tapped his full range yet. Turns out they were both right.

He was the only actor who auditioned for Miles Straume on Lost. The costume designer modeled his look on Keith Richards. That's the kind of specific, unlikely combination that keeps turning up in his career: a Chinese-American actor from Brooklyn, son of an immigrant calculus teacher, playing a sarcastic ghost-whisperer dressed like a Rolling Stone.