Disparate Characters Played by Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey are on an Ominous Collision Course in HBO’s TASK

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede   There’s an aspirational Canadian connection in the first few minutes of the new HBO drama TASK, which premieres Sunday, Sept. 7 on Crave. Tom Pelphrey plays a suburban Philadelphia-area trash collector named Robbie, who clearly is dreaming of having better things in life. While on a break, he gazes at a big magazine advertisement for Georgian Bay real estate that screams, “Own a Piece of Canadian Paradise! Premium Remote Property For Sale.” “Look at that – you can own your own island,” Robbie marvels to his colleague Cliff, played by Raúl Castillo. But Cliff immediately wonders, “Who picks up your trash?” “Your trash?” Robbie replies incredulously. “THAT’S where your head goes? … if you’re on an island, you’re not thinking about trash … you’re thinking, ‘where’s my hammock?’ ” But if there are any hammocks in Robbie’s future, he’s going to have to take some dangerous and illegal paths to get there. Thus begins the plot in TASK, which also stars Mark Ruffalo as FBI Agent Tom Brandis, and was created by Brad Ingelsby, the writer and producer behind HBO’s MARE OF EASTTOWN (on Crave as well). Both TASK and MARE OF EASTTOWN, which starred Kate Winslet, are set in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which is the same general area where Ingelsby grew up. During a virtual media conference to promote TASK, Ingelsby had a good laugh when it was pointed out to him that during the first episode, when Ruffalo’s character is manning an FBI table at a local job fair for high school students, one of the other tables is for the Easttown Police Department. “I didn’t even notice that,” said a laughing Ingelsby, crediting his crack team for the visual Easter egg. But jokes and geography aside, Ingelsby pointed out that there are significant differences between the two shows. “I knew that probably we couldn’t do a ‘whodunnit’ again, because that was the genre of MARE, that was the engine we used in MARE,” Ingelsby explained. “So when I came up with the characters for Tom and Robbie, I felt like, okay, what’s the engine that’s going to join these guys, or what’s the engine that will carry the audience through the story? So if I knew it couldn’t be a ‘whodunnit,’ I felt like, well, maybe the tension can be a collision course. The real tension is, oh no, I know they’re going to collide, and the fear is, what’s going to happen when they do.” Tom and Robbie are in completely different worlds as TASK begins, but by the end of the first episode, the explosive initial steps of what is going to bring them together have been taken and revealed. “When I talked to Mark (Ruffalo) about his character, I said, listen, there’s nothing particularly special about you as an FBI agent,” Ingelsby recalled. “You’re not the first guy through the door, you’re not good with a gun, you’re not going to, you know, walk into a room and pick up clues that other people missed. That’s not what makes you interesting as a detective. I think what makes you interesting is you’re approaching the job from a unique spot. He was a theologian. He was in the seminary. He ran a parish. He had people come into his confessional booth, right? That job is a job of service. And so, what is that character like as an FBI agent? I thought we hadn’t seen that as a detective.” The intense first episode of TASK is actually more focused on Pelphrey’s Robbie, who is a nice guy in a lot of ways. He cares about the people he loves, and he wants to do right by them. But he is nonetheless making some horrible choices that anyone with any sense knows are bound to go sideways. “I felt instantly connected with Robbie on the level, probably the most important level, of having just become a father myself,” Pelphrey said. “Wow, so weird, I immediately feel emotional. But having just become a father myself, I knew for sure something that I had only imagined before, which is that, I will do anything for my child – anything. So then to get to play Robbie, where everything he’s doing is for the sake of his children, you don’t have to blink. I don’t need to research that. I don’t need to ask anyone about it. I don’t need to spend time thinking about it. I just know in my bones that’s the truth. That was helpful. I never felt like Robbie was very far away from me at all, in a beautiful way.” Taking a wider look at TASK, while giving particular credit to Ingelsby’s writing, Pelphrey added, “every single character has a strong ‘why.’ You know, so often you have to go off on your own, and you’re doing backflips in the dark to tell yourself some dream story about why you’re doing what you’re doing. The audience is never going to know. Your director doesn’t even know. But then (Ingelsby) gives it to you, and not just gives it to you, but is sharing it in the story, in the dynamics that the audience can see.” Ingelsby said he always endeavours to put his characters first, but the job of balancing that with action is his toughest task, so to speak. “I always feel like, if bullets are going off, there’s a certain action, there’s a tension, that you can get,” he acknowledged. “But if you care about the characters while the bullets are going around, while they’re flying, that’s when the sequences have a real tension.”   billharristv@gmail.com  @billharris_tv