Task’s Tom Pelphrey Just Wanted Maeve and the Kids to Be Okay
Spoilers follow for Task finale “A Still Small Voice.”
Tom Pelphrey doesn’t appear in the final episode of Task, but that’s not the same as being absent from it. Creator Brad Ingelsby’s follow-up to his 2021 hit HBO miniseries Mare of Easttown tells the parallel stories of Robbie (Pelphrey), a sanitation worker who regularly robs the Dark Hearts, a biker gang responsible for his brother’s recent death, and Tom (Mark Ruffalo), a former priest-turned-FBI agent who reluctantly returns to active duty to investigate a string of home invasions.
Task keeps Robbie and Tom apart while ratcheting up the tension until fifth episode “Vagrants,” which sees the pair meet when Tom’s investigation brings him to Robbie’s doorstep. After successfully bluffing his way into the house, Tom fumbles an attempt to hide his reasons for being there, leading Robbie to take him hostage. Though the situation crackles with the potential for violence, the pair have an intense conversation in which they discover how much they have in common despite being on opposite sides of the law. In episode six, Robbie dies in the midst of a violent confrontation with the Dark Hearts, leaving his children in the care of his 21-year-old niece Maeve (Emilia Jones). And so, the final episode “A Still Small Voice” becomes the story of what happens in the wake of Robbie’s death, and how his family contends with the loss of a tender, damaged family man brave enough to take outrageous chances, but alarmingly shortsighted about their consequences.
We get to know Robbie very well by the end of his life, but we don’t really get a lot of details about his backstory. How much of that was in your head?
Always enough to help me flesh out what we have to do. I don’t necessarily like to go wandering off and create an entire backstory just for the sake of it, because I feel strongly that everything we’re doing has to serve the script. But I did think a lot about Robbie’s relationship with his brother Billy. What was it like when we were kids and what did we watch together and how did we spend time and was their dad there or not as much? If he wasn’t, then Billy was like my dad, or certainly the person I looked up to the most. That kind of stuff, when it feeds into what we have to do in the story, becomes useful.
The first time we see Robbie, he’s carrying his son and touching him tenderly. At that moment, I felt like I knew a lot about this guy before he’d even said anything. Did you know when you were reading the script that that moment would feel so powerful?
Jeremiah Zagar, our director, comes from the documentary world, so he’s really interested in very specific behavior. Brad writes everything to be as specific and realistic as possible, especially when it comes to how these characters move, how they live, how they express themselves. Jeremiah’s approach to what we were doing on set was the perfect embodiment of what I felt like Brad was trying to express on the page. The other parts of it were discovered on set. When I was at home with the kids, Jeremiah created an atmosphere that felt like a blanket fort when you’re a kid: very safe, calm, happy. It was like, “What do you guys want to do? How do you want to lay on the bed? How would you pick him up? Maybe you touch his forehead? How do you touch his face?”
What was the process of creating that family chemistry?
Emilia and I got along easily. We ended up having a three-hour coffee, there was so much to talk about. We also went out and did bowling with the kids and their parents before we started filming. Acting coach Noele Gentile works with Jeremiah often and she is amazing with these kids, doing workshop classes with very basic acting games. She invited Emilia and I to go, so we got to participate in some of that and started to explore what the characters’ relationships might be. Kids will always be truthful, so you never want anything to get too heady where it gets in the way of just letting them be who they are.
Caring for his family is pretty much Robbie’s defining trait, but there’s a moment in the first episode where he says to Maeve, “I didn’t realize you were so unhappy.” Can he really be so focused on his own way of pursuing his family’s happiness that he missed her pain?
Yeah, I think you can. You also get a hint in a different scene where she says, “I’m 21.” And Robbie says, “When did that happen?” Her behavior is going to change a lot when her father dies, and you could start to accept that as the new normal for her. She’s unhappy because she lost her dad, and then it lingers longer and Robbie’s very consumed in what he’s doing. You lose track of time in a way. When she tells him, “I’m unhappy because I’m here,” it’s like, wait, what? I thought you were a little sad lately because of your dad. You’re unhappy because you live here? And then it’s like, oh shit, well, what do you want to do about that? For me, it was easy to see how you would miss that. You could easily ascribe it to something else.
In the first episode, it seems like Robbie’s in the middle of a story he doesn’t realize is about to get interrupted when the home invasion goes wrong. He’s thinking about online dating and making plans for the future. In some ways, he’s ready to move on to the next stage of his life.
Robbie’s positivity comes with a sense that things happen for a reason and it’s all going to work out. It’s not focused on details and downsides. Because the robberies have gone okay so far, he thinks that’s how it’ll keep going — versus, every time we do this, we’re really fucking with disaster. We should do this a minimal number of times and then never do it again. He’s thinking, No, we got this down. We know how this goes now. I see that as kind of a shadow side of what’s really beautiful about him. Sure, he wants to meet someone and move on to the next stage of his life, but he’s not the kind of guy who spends a lot of time thinking about Plan B.
That’s an interesting contradiction. He keeps saying everything happens for a reason, but in the big scene in the car between Robbie and Tom, Robbie talks about how he doesn’t believe there’s a God. He says he’s never felt God in his life. Was that contradiction something you were exploring with the character?
No, I understood that. Robbie’s got a child’s idea of God, the kind of idea you might get as a kid going to Catholic school. It’s very removed, very like, “there’s this guy.” What I found beautiful about Robbie is he does live with real faith — it makes sense to me that somebody could be living a truth but they don’t understand it as God. You have Tom, the former priest who understands all these things, who’s struggling with them because his heart is troubled and he doesn’t have faith that things are going to turn out. He has all the learning and the knowledge that Robbie doesn’t have, yet Robbie has this weird belief that things will work out. Strangely, in that car, Robbie’s the one with a living faith, and Tom is the one who’s looking for it.
Since you knew going in that Tom and Robbie don’t meet until fairly late in the series, how do you approach those scenes? In some ways, the whole series has been building to their meeting.
I had a real sense of how much the momentum had built and how high the stakes had gotten. The violence at the end of episode four is horrific and all these wheels are in motion and all the different storylines are starting to converge. Then he spends almost half an episode on two guys sitting still in a car talking. [Laughs.] When I first read it, I was like, damn, this is bold. There’s a million other ways you could have Tom and Robbie interact. I thought it was so beautiful and so perfect. That’s the kind of risk that not every writer would take, given everything else that’s happening. Some might feel like we need to keep the ball up in the air.
You didn’t use green screen for the car scenes, right? You were actually in a moving vehicle. What are the advantages of that?
Well, let me tell you, I didn’t feel like there were any advantages on the day. It was fucking hard. Brad said, “It was the only day on set where you looked a little heartbroken.” It was very noisy with the rig and things were bouncing and metal clanging. When we did the first take of the scene, I couldn’t hear what Mark was saying, and I’m sitting like, Oh, fuck. I wish we were on the stage and could just focus on the words. Eventually we started to solve those problems because you got to do it in real time. We only have the day.
At one point — and I don’t even know if this take is in the show — a police car whipped past with its lights on, going the other way on the highway. You’ll never get a great surprise like that with a green screen. The other thing was, it’s the middle of summer in Pennsylvania, and it was hot as shit. Just sitting in that car for a while — they had some air conditioning on because otherwise you’d just cook— that starts to play on you, too. The heat and the sun are closer to what it would actually feel like to be doing that. At the end of the day, it is better. My feeling is always the less fucking acting we have to do, the better we’re all going to be.
Was the sixth episode as physically exhausting to film as it looked?
It was exhausting in a good way. Because, again, it’s Pennsylvania in the middle of summer. The hardest day was fighting with Sam Keeley, who plays Jayson. That was the longest day. We did some other stuff that morning and then we fought starting before lunch until they had to shut it down when the sun was too low. He and I fought probably for eight hours, and again, it was just hot as hell. That was a day where we both limped back to the van, and I think we were both sore for a couple days. He’s a big boy.
Did you know before reading the script that the sixth episode would be the one in which Robbie died?
I didn’t know. Brad was kind enough to let me experience the story as an audience member. And I love that I got to have that. It was heartbreaking and also perfect.
It’s interesting to me that Tom does not try to do some sort of last rites or offer a religious form of comfort. He just holds Robbie. I read that as being out of respect for what Robbie had said about God.
You know, he did a very subtle sign of the cross on my forehead. I don’t know if they used that take. The reason I know this is because after one of our takes, I sat up and looked in a mirror and I had a cross on my forehead in blood. He’d gotten blood on his hand trying to hold me, and then when he silently did the sign of the cross on my forehead, he put a bloody cross on my forehead. That was intense.
You’re not in the finale, so, what are your thoughts on how Task ends?
I thought it was so deeply satisfying to see Tom recover his faith in a way, having faith that he can let little Sam go and that he should, and having his heart open to forgive his son. Obviously what happens with Grasso is such a great fucking ending to that character’s story, that redemption. Selfishly, I’m really happy Maeve and the kids are okay. I think everybody felt that way. It was like, all right, enough people have enough bad fucking ends in this show. Leave those kids alone! Do not touch those children and do not touch Maeve!
A director friend of mine had this job somebody offered him. He had the script and he said, “If I’m going to do this, I have to see if Brad Ingelsby would take a pass.” And I said, “Huh, why Brad specifically for this?” And he said, “Because the script doesn’t have any fucking heart.” And I thought, yeah, Brad’s got heart and he earns it. It’s not fucking cheesy. He’s got a real heart for human beings, and it comes through in his writing. I thought episode seven was a really beautiful example of him not shying away from that, without tying everything up neatly in a bow or answering all the questions.