After the runaway success of slow-burn thriller Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet as a sharp-thinking small-town detective, creator-writer-showrunner Brad Inglesby is back with another action-packed edge-of-the-seat series.
Task — that streams on JioHotstar on September 8 — focuses on a Philadelphia-based FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo), who is put in charge of a task force to end a string of violent robberies undertaken by an unassuming family man (Tom Pelphrey).
In a recent virtual interaction with select global media, including t2, Brad Inglesby and actors Tom Pelphry and Emilia Jones, spoke about their series.
Brad, after Mare of Easttown, which was such a success critically and in terms of viewership, what led you back to this region and this world?
Brad Inglesby: Everything I have ever written has come from characters. I knew that probably we couldn’t do a whodunit again, which was the genre of Mare of Easttown. That was the engine we used in Mare. When I came up with the characters of Tom (played by Mark Ruffalo) and Robbie (Tom Pelphry), I said: ‘Okay, what is the engine that will carry the audience through the story?’ I thought the tension can be a collision course, and once I started to put those pieces together, I wanted to tell another story in Delco (Delaware County, Pennsylvania). It is the blood in my veins, it is the people I know and care about and it is where I grew up. I feel a certain ownership of that and a certain obligation to tell it right.
I felt that if I am going back to Delco, I wanted to make sure I am telling the story with the same level of complexity and care as we did in Mare. Once we got these two guys (Ruffalo and Pelphrey) on opposite sides of the law, it became a different kind of tension than Mare. The real tension is: ‘Oh no, I know they are going to collide’ and the fear is what is going to happen when they do. Once I was able to get the structure down and I was confident that I had a good set of characters and a real engine at the core of the story, I felt: ‘Hey, we are off to the races here.’
Task is described as a cat-and-mouse game. Do you see it that way?
Brad: A little bit. What I hope separates the show is the level of care we give to all the characters. It is again a testament to the great actors we have, that you care about everybody in the show, not just the cops. It is a drama about lives under pressure, people who are backed into a corner, who don’t have choices. As an audience, you don’t have to agree with all the decisions that are being made on screen, but you can understand why they are being made.
Tom and Emilia, how did you two get on board?
Tom Pelphry: I was blown away by what Brad put on page... it was so beautiful, engaging and well crafted. When I watched it, I thought everybody’s work was exceptional. And that happens when there is beautiful writing. Every character has a strong why. Often, you are doing backflips in the dark and telling yourself some dream story about why you are doing what you are doing. The audience is never going to know, your director doesn’t even know. But Brad gives it to you... it is there in the story, in the dynamic. It allows for complexity.
Emilia Jones: Brad is such an authentic writer. We had such a good understanding of our characters, thanks to Brad. I am a big fan of Mare of Easttown. It was a running joke on set... I have seen it 10 times! I read this script and jumped at the chance to audition for it. I feel so lucky to be a part of this project.
Brad, was the challenge of Task less about good vs evil and more about asking the audience to empathise with the characters involved even when they are at their most flawed?
Brad: Absolutely! Maeve (Emilia Jones) resents Robbie all the time, but it is possible that she also loves him. That is what we were trying to do with the characters... not paint someone as just good or bad, but to understand how these decisions are made. We were always trying to lead with compassion and empathy for every character.
I read in an interview you did about Task where you felt that Mark Ruffalo’s character Tom’s superpower is his empathy. Can you talk about that?
Brad: When talking to Mark about his character, I said: ‘Listen, there is nothing particularly special about you as an FBI agent. You are not the first guy through the door, you are not good with a gun, you are not going to walk into a room and pick up clues that other people missed. That is not what makes you interesting as a detective. What makes you interesting is that you are approaching the job from a unique spot.’
His character Tom was a theologian, he ran a parish. He had people come into his confessional booth. That job is a job of service. And so what is that character like as an FBI agent? Tom, and also Mark, are so kind and compassionate. Tom is constantly searching for the good in people and when our two guys eventually collide, that is what makes that connection work.
Tom’s superpower is the ability to see into people, to see their problems and fears and to counsel them. And that to me, I felt like we hadn’t really seen in a detective before.
Brad, you have created the scariest villains I have seen in years in the motorcycle gang. How did you come up with that?
Brad: There was a gang when I was a kid that I would hear stories about, and they were called the Warlocks. I don’t know if they really still exist any more, but in the ’70s, they were a motorcycle gang. I used a lot of tech advisors. I would ask them questions about the gang. Unfortunately, when I talked to all the cops about the real biker gangs, they were like: ‘They are addicts and they are not that organised’. I knew that we couldn’t go in that direction, that we had to feel like this was an enemy that the audience was going to be scared of.
Also, I wanted to understand them as characters and give them the same layers and complexity that I was trying to give these guys in the show. And yet, we had seen that they were capable of doing really scary things. It was a balancing act.
In the show, there is so much tension but it is not really claustrophobic. There is a lot of natural beauty that you lean into. Was it important to do that?
Brad: We had always talked about Robbie having this special place which is his idea of heaven. That is the quarry. I have loved quarries since Breaking Away (1979). It is a movie that was really influential when I was a kid. I watched it over and over again. I had always wanted to have a quarry in a show or a movie. In Robbie and Maeve’s lives, it is kind of a sacred place. It is a place where things were good, everything was still possible, where her dad was still alive and Robbie was with his wife and we wanted to give Robbie joy.
When we structured the action sequence out in the woods, we wanted it to feel open in a way that I think Mare wasn’t. Mare was very much about one community. Task has a broader canvas, and a part of that was having the characters get out. We wanted to expand the world a little bit, and a part of that was embracing nature. Some of the best scenes are at the quarry, some of the stuff we shot there was really beautiful.
How did you balance the tension between intimate family drama and the suspense of the larger narrative?
Brad: That was the biggest challenge. In Task, we were always walking a tightrope over an abyss, you know. A big part of that was leaning into the everyday humour that everyone sees in life.
Mare was a character study. It was about a woman who wasn’t going to face the death of her son. The ending image is I need to go and do the thing I have been avoiding. Task is the same, it is a character drama. In terms of Robbie, it is a story of sacrifice. In terms of Tom, it is a story of forgiveness and acceptance.
It was always about saying that we need to have a moment of tension, but also that we can’t lose sight of what the show is about. I am always mindful of that as a writer... to have moments of both. I think it is a balancing act, and it is also about giving these amazing actors room to breathe and the space to have really quiet moments amidst the chaos and the bullets. I always feel that if you care about the characters while the bullets are flying, those are the sequences with real tension.