This year’s best supporting actor in a drama series Emmy race includes 58-year-old Billy Crudup, who has won the category twice for The Morning Show, and seven younger men — including three from The Pitt, the year’s most nominated show — who have never won an Emmy; in fact, this is the first nomination for three of them, including the one who many are predicting to win: Tom Pelphrey, who is nominated for HBO‘s Task.
The 44-year-old has been doing acclaimed work on the stage and screens big and small for more than 20 years, picking up along the way two Daytime Emmys (for the CBS soap Guiding Light) and Critics Choice and Primetime Emmy nominations (for Netflix’s Ozark, on which he played the bipolar brother of Laura Linney’s Wendy).
But never has he been better received than he was for Task, in which he plays Robbie Prendergrast, a single father and sanitation worker in Delaware County [Delco], Pennsylvania, who is mourning the murder of his brother and robbing the biker gang responsible for the death, putting him in the crosshairs of both that gang and an FBI task force led by Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo, also Emmy-nominated).
Pelphrey recently discussed it all on THR‘s Awards Chatter podcast.
How did Task first cross your radar?
They sent me scripts of the first two episodes and asked me to put two scenes on tape. I loved Mare of Easttown, but I’d never met Brad Ingelsby [who created Mare and Task]. Honestly, it was like Ozark in the sense that as soon as I read it, I knew there was work to be done, but there was just something about the character that I felt like I understood completely and then I wanted it, it just made sense to me. So we put a few scenes on tape real quick and sent them off, and just like Ozark, I heard back a couple of days later, and they were like, “Great, you’re going to do this.”
Delco is not that far from where you grew up. Robbie has a very specific but cool and memorable accent. Coincidence? Like I said, I felt like I understood the character immediately. But that was the part that was keeping me up at night, the accent, partially because some of it is the same as my accent from New Jersey. So it’s like, oh, great, I already know how to do that. But then the problem is you get seduced into thinking that the rest of the accent works in a similar way, and it doesn’t. I knew if I don’t do this right, nothing else I do matters here. People truly stop listening. I was working with Susanne Sulby, a great accent coach, all the time. I was doing all the deep dives on YouTube. I had people that I got introduced to who were from Delco that I could call and talk to on the phone. All that stuff.
You called a scene in episode three, in which Robbie talks to his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones) in the car, the most important scene in the whole show. Why was that?
You come into the world of Task and see Robbie doing pretty extreme things and you think, “Well, regardless of the circumstances that might have put him in this place, he’s still doing some pretty irresponsible things, considering the fact that he’s got to take care of these kids. His children are depending on him, and to some extent Maeve kind of is as well.” And then you get this scene that is born out of exhaustion. It’s the middle of the night, and Robbie tells Maeve, “I just need a little more time. Not because I want to get away with this, not because I think I’m great. Just literally let me make money to take care of my children, which is the only reason I’m doing any of this in the first place.” There’s a vulnerability to have to be in that position.
Tom Pelphrey (in back) and Mark Ruffalo in HBO’s Task.
Peter Kramer/HBO
Episode six seems like it would have been the most physically punishing. Have you ever shot anything as grueling as that chase sequence?
There were definitely days on Ozark where, by the end of the day, I was cross-eyed, like, “I want to go to bed.” But another thing that those two shows have in common is that at certain points, we were filming on the East Coast in July, which is so hot and so humid, it’s just gnarly. But on Task, it was also so fun that there’s certain days where you’re going to run around in the woods and fight gigantic Sam [Keeley, who plays Jayson Wilkes, member of the biker gang]. I wasn’t going to give him anything on the day, but three days later, I was like, “Yo, bro, I’m still sore. It still hurts.” Because you watch that fight scene and you see it play out on the screen for two minutes. But it took us eight hours to film.
Let’s talk about the final scene of episode six, in which Robbie, against all odds, winds up in Tom’s arms. What a way to say goodbye to the character.
It was really beautiful. When I was lying in his arms, Mark as Tom gave me as Robbie last rites, and because he was using his hand to help me cover where I was stabbed, when he pulls his right hand to do last rites on my forehead, it wasn’t planned — I had a perfect cross of blood on the center of my forehead. … It was like Ash Wednesday, but it was blood. That was kind of wild. Aside from how sad it was, I thought it was a really beautiful moment in all of this that Robbie might be able to offer Tom something back that he’d been missing.
This story appeared in the Aug. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
