Inside the Making of ‘Task,’ the Crime Drama Follow-Up to ‘Mare of Easttown’
After Mark Ruffalo wrapped I Know This Much Is True, the 2020 HBO limited series based on Wally Lamb’s tragic novel about a paranoid schizophrenic man in the wake of a violent breakdown, he decided he needed a break from heavy material. He was looking for a comedy, but the comedies weren’t coming. He made Poor Things and All the Light We Cannot See and then HBO came calling again — with a show centered around a grieving FBI agent. “They were like, ‘I think we might break him,’” Ruffalo says with a laugh.
But the actor read the script and was instantly captivated by the depth of the lead character. “It described this habit he has of swirling his drink with his finger and then licking and shaking it, and I was like, who is this guy who does that?” he says. “I loved it. And I loved a screenwriter who had the insight to write something so idiosyncratic.”
That screenwriter was Brad Ingelsby, best known for his blockbuster Kate Winslet-starrer Mare of Easttown. The series followed the titular Mare as she investigated a brutal murder in her small Northeast Pennsylvania town; it scored Inglesby an Emmy nomination (Winslet won for outstanding lead actress in a limited series) and an overall deal with HBO. (There have been calls for a follow up ever since.)
He was looking to create another show based in Delaware County — or “DelCo,” as its known locally and in Inglesby’s work — and came up with the story that became Task. Whereas Mare of Easttown was a whodunit, Task is more of a cops-and-robbers tale. Its protagonists are Tom Brandis, a former priest-turned-FBI agent, and Robbie Prendergast, a single father who uses his garbage route as cover to scope out drug houses to rob. Brandis is put in charge of a task force assigned to break the string of robberies just as Robbie starts zeroing in on the haul that, he believes, will give his family a fresh start. “The tension of the story is that you care about both of these guys,” says Ingelsby. “You want Robbie to get away and you want Tom to get a win. But you know that can’t happen.”
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Ingelsby tries not to write his scripts with specific actors in mind (“It’s a recipe for disaster, because you can get attached to someone and then they’re busy doing a Marvel movie for three years”) but as the character of Tom Brandis came together on the page — inspired in part by Ingelsby’s uncle, who is himself an ex-priest — he realized he needed someone extremely specific. “The guy’s from the Northeast, he’s humble, he has a very specific perspective on life, and he has adopted children,” he says. “You start to go, ‘Wait, who is believable as this?’ It’s a narrow list, and Mark Ruffalo was at the top of it.”
Ingelsby and director Jeremiah Zagar took the actor out to dinner in New York. “I wanted to get a sense of who I was going to be spending the next big chunk of my life with,” Ruffalo says of their first meeting. “And we really hit it off.”
The part of Robbie Prendergast was more difficult. They were looking for someone with the physicality to be believable as a criminal, but the tenderness to be a father the audience can get behind. And, much like the leads in Mare of Easttown, he has a very heavy — and very specific — DelCo accent. They found all that in Tom Pelphrey, who had recently received an Emmy nomination for his recurring guest role as Laura Linney’s bi-polar brother on Ozark. Producers sent him the script for the first episode of Task, but it was actually Pelphrey’s partner Kaley Cuoco who first saw the potential. “She wanted something to read, and I was like, ‘Well I have this [Task] script,’ and she read it and was like, ‘This is one of the best TV scripts I’ve ever seen,’” he says. “And then she was like, ‘Did it write this for you?’”
Pelphrey grew up in New Jersey, and describes a shared blue collar sensibility with Ingelsby’s version of northern Pennsylvania. “It doesn’t happen very often, I don’t think it’s happened to me since Ozark, but when I read it I just knew that I understood this guy,” he says. “I can feel it, and I can hear it, I felt like I couldn’t make a bad turn.” He put a few scenes on tape, and then showed up to a Zoom with Ingelsby and Zagar with the grown-out beard and hair that has become a staple of his in-between-jobs look, and the role was his.
Like Mare before it, Ingelsby filmed Task on location in and around Delaware County. After a strike-induced work stoppage, production took place during the spring and summer of 2024. Ruffalo had been daydreaming about Tom Brandis since he signed on, and he arrived to his first costume fitting with the request that he be 30-40 pounds heavier. After a moment of shock, the designers outfitted him with a pregnant belly to deliver Tom’s now-signature paunch. “Then when I went in for my camera test, the producers saw me and their jaws hit the ground,” he laughs. “They were like, ‘We don’t want to see Mark Ruffalo like this!’f But I think it’s these impediments that make Tom such a dynamic FBI agent because he makes up for it in other ways. And, I did come to find out from Scott Duffy, our technical advisor from the FBI, that people like Tom are good agents because of their compassion with people and ability to interview them.”
Pelphrey prepared in other ways. He’d recently marked his daughter’s first birthday, and sharing a fatherhood connection with his character helped him unlock new elements of Robbie. “This is a guy who is making bad decisions, but he’s raising his children by himself and it’s clear that whatever he’s doing that’s questionable is for their sake,” he says. “Being a dad 100 percent informed how I played this. It just opened up an entire fucking wing of the house that I never even knew was there.” Pelphrey and Cuoco moved to Pennsylvania for the entirety of the shoot so that they could keep their family together, and he says he felt ecstatic to show them the East Coast of his own childhood.
He also spent a lot of time perfecting Robbie’s accent, and says it didn’t come together until shortly before filming began. “That fucking accent was honestly keeping me up at night,” he laughs. One of Task’s crewmembers put Pelphrey in touch with her cousin, a longtime DelCo resident who was willing to spend long hours on the phone with the actor as he honed his vowels. “There’s the DelCo ‘O,’ which no one else even a half an hour away makes the sound like that,” he says. “And, I don’t have an explanation for this, but I realized the rule is you only use that sound once per sentence, even if there are multiple vowels in the sentence.”
Even though Ruffalo and Pelphrey are the two leads of the show, the show’s cat-and-mouse format — following their individual storylines as the task force moves closer to solving the crime and Robbie delves further into the crime — meant that the actors only filmed together for a couple of days. Pelphrey kept himself deliberately isolated from the show’s other plots, allowing him to retain the element of surprise when he finally watched the show in its entirety. “I was fully crying,” he says. “Kaley and I watched it together, and we were both a fucking mess.”
Ruffalo says he’s still making his way through the episodes, but that he’s been struck anew by the show’s deft handling of the region’s working class poor. “I have a dear friend who is an ex-con, and he’s actually in the series, and we were talking about the material of the show and he told me, ‘Mark, there’s no excuses but there’s always a reason’ — that became the ethos of everything for me, it never left me,” he says. “There are reasons that people end up in the lives that they have, and those reasons are just as meaningful as someone who decides to become a doctor or lawyer. That’s what allows this show to offer a really compassionate and empathetic take on cops and robbers.”
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Task premieres Sunday, Sept. 7, at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on HBO Max.
