Before Tom Pelphrey started shooting his supporting role of a lifetime in “Task” as Robbie Prendergrast, a garbage collector who robs trap houses run by a biker gang in the rural suburbs of Philadelphia, he was daydreaming about his tattoos.
It all had to do with the relationship between Robbie and his older brother, Billy, whose photo hangs from the rearview mirror of Robbie’s garbage truck. Billy’s death at the hands of the Dark Hearts, we learn, prompted Robbie’s string of robberies and his nihilistic risk-taking to ruin the gang.
Billy’s death, too, is why Robbie’s 21-year-old niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones), is now living with him, sacrificing her youth to help raise his two kids after his wife abandoned them. And it’s the event that has catapulted him onto a collision course with Mark Ruffalo’s alcoholic FBI agent, Tom Brandis, after one of those robberies goes horribly wrong.
Pelphrey was hooked by the script and thought about his own relationship with his younger brother. “Anyone who has a sibling, whether they’re younger or older, it really does kind of shape who you are and who you become in so many ways,” he said from a car taking him to one of a string of For Your Consideration events in Los Angeles, near where he lives with fiancée Kaley Cuoco and their 3-year-old daughter, Matilda.
“I thought that was fascinating,” he continued, “to think about having this older brother who you really, really look up to and admire, and who kind of took care of you, and what that loss would mean.”
That’s where the tattoos came in, because the ink on Robbie’s body is Pelphrey’s vision of the brothers as kids. He then persuaded series creator Brad Ingelsby (“Mare of Easttown”) and the makeup department to let Robbie commemorate his memories on his skin.
The tattoos include a set of black bands circling Robbie’s right forearm and the Chinese character zhōng, which roughly translates to “loyalty,” on his neck—identical to a famous tattoo inked on Philadelphia 76ers point guard Allen Iverson, whom Robbie and Billy would’ve worshiped. On opposite arms, Robbie also has a mongoose and a snake, references to “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”, a 1975 Chuck Jones cartoon based on “The Jungle Book” that Pelphrey and his brother were obsessed with in the ’90s.
“I knew the audience would never even understand what they were for,” he said. “But every morning you go to work and you put those tattoos on, and each one I know has a very specific meaning, and it triggers a very specific memory that I’ve built as Robbie about my brother, about my childhood.
“When I saw those tattoos, it always helped ground me. This is where he’s from and this is what shaped him. That’s the world I wanted to stay in, where everything important is family. And now that his brother is gone, taking care of his kids and his brother’s child [Maeve] is the only thing that really matters.”
Pelphrey has two Daytime Emmys from his first real acting job on “Guiding Light,” playing the volatile son of a lead character, and he’s best known for his heartbreaking performance as the bipolar brother of Laura Linney’s Wendy in season 3 of Netflix’s “Ozark,” for which he delivered a masterful, breakneck five-minute monologue in the back seat of a cab. (Fans are still raging that the Emmys snubbed him that year, though he did eventually win a guest-actor award for a flashback in Season 4.)
“Task” is arguably his star-making turn at 43. He’s not just a new addition to a cult streaming show; he’s a foundational part of a hugely popular HBO thriller. Here, he’s one crucial part of a two-hander about a cat-and-mouse hunt between troubled men trying to do right by their families. Still, Pelphrey is incapable of bragging about himself, constantly changing the subject to gush about his cast mates or Ingelsby — something he said his publicist “yells” at him about all the time.
But he does have some proud moments — for one thing, Jones still calls him “uncle” two years after shooting wrapped. He, in turn, checks in on her often, because they were so able to embody the love and desperation of being each other’s only family. That neither Maeve nor Robbie understands how much they’re sacrificing for each other is “what makes the show so tragic,” he says.
Part of what makes Pelphrey’s performance so raw and mesmerizing is that he grew up in this world, in working-class New Jersey just an hour from Delco (Delaware County, Pennsylvania), where “Task” takes place. His grandfather dug holes for telephone poles and was president of the electrical union; his uncles were mechanics; Pelphrey installed fences, worked in a factory and did landscaping. Beyond the manual labor, he intrinsically understood how these guys express affection, or aggression, “which is a very northeastern kind of thing.”
Harder to nail, he says, was that impossible Delco accent that didn’t seem to follow any consistent rules. He spent months working with a dialect coach and obsessively watching YouTube videos, before finally getting the phone numbers of folks from Delco and doing the bulk of his learning by “actually speaking to human beings,” he says.
The Screen Actors Guild strike also helped him by delaying shooting until he had a year of fatherhood under his belt. “Once you become [a parent], then you know for sure in every ounce of your being that you could justify almost anything in the name of protecting and providing for your children,” he said.
That power translated to actual pain in the show’s penultimate episode, when Robbie has an epic physical confrontation with Jayson (Sam Keeley), the drug dealer and gang leader responsible for his brother’s death. According to Pelphrey, those blows felt as real as they looked. “Sam is a big boy and we were fighting,” he said.
“We fought that day for about eight hours. You never want to say it on the day, but yeah, I was limping home that day. I called him the next day, and I was like, ‘Bro, I can’t move too well,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah man, neither can I!’”
This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
The post For Tom Pelphrey, the Key to His ‘Task’ Character Is the Tattoos appeared first on TheWrap.
