When “Mare of Easttown” creator Brad Ingelsby pitched HBO execs his newest crime drama, he didn’t have the crime, the investigation, or the major story beats figured out. Instead, what he sold was a “working-class ‘Heat,’” set once again in a small town outside Philadelphia.
While a guest on an upcoming episode of IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Ingelsby talked about how the structure of his new seven-episode miniseries “Task” was heavily inspired by director Michael Mann’s 1995 cat-and-detective drama pitting Al Pacino’s top cop against Robert De Niro’s master thief.
“What Michael Mann was able to do, in my opinion, was you wanted Robert De Niro to get away, and you wanted Al Pacino to get him,” said Ingelsby on the podcast. “You knew those two things couldn’t coexist, and so the tension was, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen? Because I love them both.’ And I wanted the same for this show.”
Like with “Heat,” the fact that the two characters eventually come face to face isn’t a spoiler, but the focus of the “Task” marketing and trailer. Whereas “Mare” was a whodunit, Ingelsby entered the “Task” writing process knowing the tension propelling the story forward was the audience nervously anticipating the inevitable collision of FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) and the masked bandit Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey).
But unlike “Heat,” Tom, the former priest turned FBI agent, and Robbie, the trash collector taking down a biker gang’s drug houses, are hardly masters of their trade. “Task” executive producer and director Jeremiah Zagar told IndieWire that while developing the series with Ingelsby, they’d joke, “If ‘Heat’ was about the best cop and criminal in the world, ours were just about the worst.”
Ingelsby would bring on Zagar, a fellow Pennsylvania native whose career had also been rooted in exploring the world in and around Philadelphia (“We the Animals,” “Hustle”), after writing the first episode, and before outlining the rest of the series. Instead of a writers’ room, the creator wanted a filmmaking collaborator to help explore the pain and ordinary lives of Tom and Robbie.
“I think that’s what’s so cool about what Brad does; he takes genre, and he uses it as a moving train, whose passengers are people you’ve never met before,” said Zagar. “The masks, the collision course, the crime, the drug houses — he’s using these tropes that we find familiar to explore something completely new. It’s such a beautiful way of communicating the deep, powerful, painful emotions that we as a society aren’t as used to grappling with on television and in the movies.”
The parallels of Tom and Robbie’s station in life are clearly drawn in the first two episodes. Both are single fathers, approaching the one-year anniversary of having lost their wives, and still very much grieving (Robbie for his brother, Tom for his wife), while grappling with the fallout of the disturbing events surrounding their deaths. But what is also explored is the contrasting ways the two men handle their loss.
“[Tom] was a priest, and he’s lost his faith in God. He’s lost his faith in the world. And Robbie, at the same time, he’s lost his wife, but he’s thrown himself into a process of revenge, and that’s given him purpose,” said Zagar. “Robbie’s life is filled with color and joy and family. Tom’s life is filled with a giant gaping nothing.”
That contrast is what drives Zagar’s underlying visual language in the first two episodes, before the narrative engine of the investigation takes hold. Robby’s scenes are alive, shot on steadicam, filled with physical affection, and surrounded by the colorful world of nature in the summer. That style brings back to mind Zagar’s breakout indie “We the Animals” — which also starred Raúl Castillo — and intentionally deviates from the gloomy grays of “Mare,” which was shot in the same 30-to-60-minute radius outside Philly. It’s a sharp juxtaposition to images of Tom sweeping out the abandoned house he turns into the HQ for a task force he doesn’t want to run, and drinking alone in his dark home, so riddled with shame he’s become a stranger to his daughter (Silvia Dionicio).
It’s a visual contrast that also played out in the casting of Pelphrey and Ruffalo, and how each actor physically approached their characters.
Zagar early on pitched Ruffalo as Tom, an idea everyone agreed was perfect, except execs warned they would never get the actor to do another HBO series after the ulcer-inducing, weight-loss-and-gain grind of playing dual roles in “I Know This Much Is True.” Ruffalo, though, came aboard after reading “Task,” and with a very strong take on how the pain of the last year of his character’s life would manifest itself.
“I was a bit startled because [Ruffalo] was like, ‘I want to wear a fat suit, I want to have a pad that I wear,’ and that was not in the script,” said Ingelsby. “He [said of his character], ‘I think I just lost my routine. I’m not eating right, and I need to feel that as a character.’ And that was Mark’s choice, physically carrying the weight of a loss in every scene. You constantly feel his pain, it’s in his shoulders, chest, walk.”
It’s a sharp contrast to the freedom of movement Pelphrey brought to the often-bare-chested, athletic Robbie. But the actor’s physicality was one of many ingredients that would make it a difficult role to cast.
“I knew I wanted Robbie to be more physically imposing than Tom. It just made sense to me. And [Pelphrey] is a strong guy, he’s a tall guy,” said Ingelsby. “He’s also a joyful guy. He was a joy in his eyes. There’s an almost childlike quality about him in an amazing way, because I always saw Robbie as a dreamer. He’s down and out all the time, but he always thinks he’s going to get out of it. He has a belief, and Tom doesn’t have any belief. So we had to get an actor that could do that, who could be a loving dad, yet you also believe could go into a drug house and pistol-whip somebody and tie up these guys.”
Both Zagar and Ingelsby, independent of one another, knew they had found their Robbie watching Pelphrey’s audition tape. According to Zagar, the actor’s audition was the only one to capture that childlike joy, which was vital to threading the needle of the character.
Although the Howell Township, New Jersey native Pelphrey was familiar with the characters and world of “Task,” the clean-shaven, traditionally handsome actor wasn’t necessarily a natural fit. Zagar always saw him having a big pushy beard, like the director himself — Ingelsby joked Robbie was Zagar’s “spirit animal.”
“Robbie’s the kind of guy who cuts his own hair, so his beard is unkempt, whether he shaves his head or had long hair, either one worked,” said Zagar. “The guys we know in these rural communities — like my closest friend, he’s a farmer, I’d never seen the guy go to a barber since he was 20 years old, since we lived in the city. Once you live out there, you’re not worried about the way you look in the same way.”
The problem: Part of Ruffalo’s off-his-routine vision of his character was with a beard, and there was a sense within the “Task” team that both leads having unkempt beards was too much. So, after telling Pelphrey to grow out his beard, Ingelsby and Zagar hopped on a Zoom with the actor to break the news that they would have to go in another direction to find Robbie’s look.
“He popped up on the screen with his long hair and the huge beard he’d been growing for a while now, and [Jeremiah and I] looked at each other and we’re like, ‘No, that’s Robbie,’” said Ingelsby. “Because he’s such a handsome guy, and we didn’t want Robbie to look that handsome. We wanted to do something with his teeth, and we wanted him to feel like a guy that never looked in the mirror — he’d get up in the morning, go out on his trash route. Tom embraced it. He came up with all the tattoos; everyone meant something to him as a character. He mapped it all out.”
Episode 3 of “Task” airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, September 21.
To make sure you don’t miss Brad Ingelsby’s October 20 interview about “Task,” subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.