Task: Tom Pelphrey on That Bloody Fight and Devastating Death

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the sixth episode of Task.

In Task, Brad Ingelsby follows two men with troubled pasts as they head toward a predestined showdown. The question, as Ingelsby says, is not whether they will meet, but “when are they going to collide? And when they collide, what’s going to happen?”

In the show’s fifth episode, FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) finally meets Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage man by day who robs drug houses by night. Tom, a man suffering from the loss of his wife and the dissolution of his family, has been tasked with uncovering the thief.

After a tense standoff, the violence comes to a head in the show’s next episode, when members of the Dark Hearts motorcycle gang track down Robbie as Tom and his team are trying to apprehend them. They converge in a bloody woodland battle that leads to multiple deaths—including that of Robbie, who is stabbed by Jayson (Sam Keeley), the Dark Heart who’s also responsible for the death of Robbie’s brother. Though Tom tries to help, Robbie dies in his arms on the way to the hospital.

Pelphrey—who shares a daughter with fiancée Kaley Cuoco—didn’t know exactly how Robbie’s story would end when he signed on to the show. He learned his character’s fate while visiting family for Thanksgiving in Florida, where he read his final scripts for Task. “It’s not going to work out for everybody, and it’s kind of obvious, looking at the circumstances, who has the most shitty chance of succeeding,” he says. “It’s the heart of all good tragedy: We’re rushing toward something inevitable, and yet it’s still compelling. I thought it was beautiful and obviously sad.” So is this career-best performance from Pelphrey, who Vanity Fair can exclusively report will run in the supporting-actor category at next year’s Emmys. In conversation, Pelphrey reveals why he felt nervous about nailing a Delco accent, his secret to keeping storylines straight while shooting a TV series, and what he thought of Robbie’s final moments.

Vanity Fair: What were you most concerned about when it came to playing Robbie?

Tom Pelphrey: The obvious answer is the accent. It’s so specific, and it lives so large in the audience’s mind. I didn’t grow up in Delco, but it’s so similar to where I grew up—that’s so much of the vibe and the energy. The values were the same. So that part I understood, but in terms of just knowing what you were going to have to put your head down and do for a long time before it felt right, it was definitely the accent.

How did you decide on Robbie’s look, with the big beard and long hair?

Well, it was just kind of a happy accident. I am always scared to cut my hair and also a little bit lazy with my beard, so when I don’t work, it just kind of grows. And we had a Zoom about this job after the completion of the [actors] strike. For six or seven months, there were no scissors anywhere near my head. I looked like I just crawled out of a cave. Brad and [Task director] Jeremiah [Zagar] were on the Zoom and they were all like, “Just leave it.”

What about his physicality?

Obviously, he’s very physical, for both his daytime job and his nighttime job. It’s part of the culture growing up where I grew up [in New Jersey], and I imagine Delco is the same. I had my first weight bench when I was 12 years old, and I was definitely not the only one. I used to go into the garage before I went to high school in the morning and lift weights, and I wasn’t even an athlete. And a lot of the guys that I grew up with from then, you keep it as part of your life, even if you’re just doing push-ups and pull-ups and stuff. So I wanted to make sure that Robbie felt exactly like that in his body.

How did you come to understand the choices Robbie makes?

It doesn’t happen this way all the time, but this one I felt like I understood almost immediately. As I was reading the scripts, even for the first time, every move he made, I was like, Yep. There’s definitely something about Robbie that made immediate sense to me in a way that really doesn’t happen all that often.

Why do you think that is?

Certainly being a dad, it just changes you. I have no problem understanding how people will do whatever they need to do for their children. And that’s really the heart of Robbie. That’s the engine that’s driving the car the entire time.

What ended up being the hardest part of this role for you?

Given that we’re not going to film at all in order, it was just really important to remember where I was coming from and where I’m going, because you’re filming this shit four months apart. You have to really be on top of making sure that the continuity—other people will help me with clothes and hair—of the emotional life is on the right track so it doesn’t feel jumpy. Where we were renting this house in Pennsylvania, I put a ton of shit up on the walls. Kaley just walks by and rolls her eyes at me. It looks like fucking Homeland. Part of that is literally having a very abbreviated version of the story that I can physically look at with my eyeballs, so I don’t have to flip through 300 pages of scripts. Laura Linney taught me a version of it on Ozark, and to this day I’ll always use it.

Robbie and Tom finally meet in the fifth episode, and Robbie takes Tom, by gunpoint, on a drive. What was it like to finally have that time with Mark Ruffalo?

When we were driving, we were actually in a car on the highway and it was hot as hell. These old cars, the air conditioning is useless unless you’re driving it, and we were being pulled. It was strangely so private because I couldn’t see Mark [who was in the front seat]. It was weirdly like being alone—because of where I was sitting in the seat, I couldn’t even see the side of his face. It was so beautiful, but it’s also so bold to do that in the midst of what’s happening in the story—to just stop everything and spend half an episode in a car with these two, just talking. Really beautiful.

What was it like shooting that fight scene with Sam Keeley in episode six?

It was a long day. Sam is a big dude and he’s intense, and he was amped up. We were probably fighting each other for six hours straight—it was hot as shit. What’s great about Sam is he’s comfortable in his body, and I am as well. He’s got good control of himself, and I think I can control myself decently, so everybody’s going to be safe. I’m not one of those actors who wants it to look real at any cost. My first concern is always to do this safely, because we’re going to have to do this for a long time. I remember both of us at the end of that day, when the sun was going down, walking back toward the vans to go home, and we were both limping and moving very slowly.

There’s a lot of close-ups of your face during the fight, which makes it feel very emotional.

When you break it down, for Robbie in particular, the literal source of all of the pain is this fucking guy—he’s literally responsible for every bad thing that Robbie’s dealing with and going through. This fight should feel desperate, really desperate and emotional.

What did you think about his final moments when he is in Tom’s arms in the car?

When I read it, I was very moved. Playing it on the day was really technical because whatever the experience of the audience is at this point in the story, that’s not Robbie’s experience. And for me, the actor, it was just literally trying to slow everything down enough to believe that if they put a camera in my face that we could think that it’s slipping away and eventually gone, which is a weirdly challenging thing to do.