“If you care about the characters while the bullets are flying, that’s when the sequences have a real tension”: Brad Ingelsby, Tom Pelphrey and Emilia Jones on Task
Shortly before its release on HBO and Sky UK, Variety editor Brent Lang moderated a virtual press conference for Task, the new series by Brad Ingelsby. The showrunner, writer and producer was joined by actors Tom Pelphrey, who plays delinquent Robbie Prendergrast, and Emilia Jones, who portrays his niece, Maeve.
The event begins with an explanation that star Mark Ruffalo (“Special Agent Tom Brandis”), who was originally scheduled to participate in the conversation, was unable to attend due to illness and is hoped to make a speedy recovery.
On the conception of the show, Ingelsby shares that what he knew from the start was that the new project couldn’t be a whodunit because of his previous one, Mare of Easttown. His characters are the origin of all of his ideas, he says, and once he had come up with Tom and Robbie, “two guys on opposing sides of the law,” he had to find an engine to drive the narrative. “What’s the engine that’s going to join these guys, or what’s the engine that will carry the audience through the story?” Putting together the pieces, he decided that “maybe the tension could be a collision course?” He hoped that this concept could be equally potent as the guessing game of Mare.
What links Task to its successful predecessor is the setting of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Ingelsby reveals, “It’s the blood in my veins, it’s the people I know, the people I care about, the way I grew up. And so I feel a certain ownership of that, and a certain obligation to tell it right.” What this meant for the actors was mastering a very distinct dialect. British actress Jones credits coach Susanne Sulby (who also worked with Kate Winslet for Mare), with whom she spent months on Zoom calls, before flying out and doing field research in DelCo. “It’s not just an accent, it’s like an energy that I noticed from when I was going around bars,” she shares.
Pelphrey adds that he worked with Sulby as well, but another member of the crew put him in touch with a cousin, who had the full accent. “We could just start talking about football,” he says, “And he knew I wanted to listen to how his sounds were. But after a while, we’d get so engrossed in the conversation that he could really relax. Because part of me was: I have to hear someone really use it. You know, there’s a certain point at which you can no longer trust anything except like, ‘I need to hear that come out of someone’s mouth.’”
As an American, Pelphrey had an easier time shedding the accent after they wrapped. Jones had another shoot right after, in which she played a character from the States: “I was meant to just be general American, and my dialect coach kept saying, ‘You sound like you’re from a different part of America, but not British,’” she laughs, “’Oh, I am still from Delco!’ It took me a really long time to get my American accent to go back to normal.”
The actors gush about getting to shoot on location, and Pelphrey highlights the quarries. “You get to just keep jumping into the water off the rocks. Like, we’re getting paid to do this?” In terms of getting into character, he says having just become a father himself helped. “To get to play Robbie, where everything he’s doing is for the sake of his children…I don’t need to research that. I don’t need to ask anyone about it…I just know in my bones that that’s the truth.” Jones agrees that family is the crucial factor to their roles and compares Maeve to her character in Coda, with both young women bearing responsibility beyond their years. “But I actually think that Maeve is carrying the weight of loss and Ruby was carrying the weight of love.”
Ingelsby is asked about the music on the show and starts by giving credit to HBO for being game, as he had very specific ideas about it. “I would say 90% of the songs we wanted got to be in the show.” Having grown up in the area and frequented the bars the series is set in, he had first-hand knowledge of which songs would or would not be playing on their jukebox. On top of the realism, he wanted to step away from obvious choices like generic metal for bikers. What the team ended up with was Richard and Linda Thompson. Working with composer Dan Deacon, they focused on themes for the characters and how they would intersect: “If you watch the show, you’ll hear the theme, Susan’s theme in Tom’s life.”
A question to the actors about drawing from personal experience to push their performance quickly turns into a discussion on being given space and allowing space for the unexpected on set. “Brad leaves the door open and Jeremiah [Zagar, the director] turns the light on,” Pelphrey says. Jones adds, “I would always leave the scene going, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was going to happen’ or ‘I didn’t know I was going to go to that level of emotion’ or ‘that level of anger.’” The safe atmosphere to explore was also necessary, as they worked with children, who Pelphrey says, “are gonna do what they are gonna do…That was embraced in a way that I thought made us all better.”
On the topic of balancing the suspense of the narrative with the intimate family drama, Ingelsby discloses that it was walking a tightrope and a challenge in every project. But one always informs the other. “If bullets are going off, there’s a certain action, there’s a tension that you can get. But if you care about the characters while the bullets are flying, that’s when the sequences have a real tension.”
The showrunner concludes that he succeeded in the most important thing: “I can get up in the morning and say ‘that’s absolutely the show I wanted to make’. I said that about Mare, and I will say it about Task. That’s the show that I wanted to make, so I’m really proud of that.”
Selina Sondermann
Task is released on Sky on 8th September 2025.
Watch the trailer for Task here:
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