‘Task’ Creator, Tom Pelphrey and Emilia Jones break Episode One

“Task,” Brad Ingelby’s sequel to “Mare of Easttown” starts as a piece of lifelong drama before he released in the last half of his first episode in explosive violence.

Viewers are introduced to Tom Brandis, a former priest-FBI agent, played by a Perky Mark Ruffalo. He is struggling – too much drinking and too little sleeping – clearly chased by a tragedy that still has to reveal Ingelby (although it is known that his son is in prison). Tom does not seem too interested in his work. He is at the course of the career, until he is reluctantly assigned to run a Task Force to investigate a series of robberies that focus on the drug houses of a motorcycle gang called The Dark Hearts. And your ears don’t cheat on you – the characters in “Task” speak with the same regional Pennsylvania base as the characters in “Mare of Easttown.” Both shows take place in the Blue Collar communities around Delaware County.

Unlike ‘Mare of Easttown’, what a whodunnit was, ‘task’ does not disguise who is behind the crime porridge. That would be a garbageman called Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), who uses his route to reach potential goals. He may be a criminal, but he seems like a decent man. He is a single father who raises his children with his niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones). Even when her uncle is messing up her date, Maeve interrupts while she gets free with the man and gets a push match with him, it is difficult to root against Robbie. Well, at least until Robbie and his colleague bandit Cliff (Raúl Castillo) and Peaches (Owen Teague) sneak into a drug house and do not get the upper hand in the dealers, which leads to a wild confrontation. (Peaches, we hardly knew you!).

But there is another surprise in the store. A young boy is also in the house and leaves Robbie and Cliff without a choice then to kidnap him, because he has seen them without their masks. Can a confrontation between Robbie and Tom cross moral rubicon can be a confrontation far away?

In anticipation of the debut of “Task”, Ingelphrey and Jones take the explosive first episode of the seven-part HBO mini series.

Brad, when you wrote this showWhy did you decide to unfold it in Delaware County, the same place where “Mare of Easttown” was set?

Brad Ingelby: It’s just laziness. It’s the people I know. It is the blood in my veins. If I can write stories about this area for the rest of my life, I would be satisfied. When I write a story about a group of people in Wisconsin or in Minnesota, I have to do some research. I have to spend time there to get an idea of ​​the rhythms of their lives. So for me it is about wanting to tell a story about the people I grew up with. Although I don’t know a FBI agent or an agent, my uncle was a priest who left the priesthood. So there are connected pieces of my own life. I also felt that I had more stories to tell there. It was not as if ‘mare’ exhausted that in me. ‘Mare’ was very much about a mother and a son. In ‘Task’, especially with Tom, it is about Guy who has seen the pillars of his life and everything he considered to crumble. He tries to understand his suffering.

Is this story part of the same universe as “Mare of Easttown”?

Ingelby: Absolute. We wanted to embrace that. We never said, “Let’s try not to make it like ‘mare’.” In fact, much of the same crew from “mare” worked on this show, because we wanted there to be a consistency, and we wanted the audience to look at the show and think: “This is ‘mare’s’ world, but the story is different.”

What did you hope to set up with this first episode?

Ingelby: The first episode tries to determine the clash of the show. It was important to determine the two leads and their home life and their jobs. I wanted to lean an audience on the emotional arches of the characters. They know that something is wrong with Mark’s character and there is something wrong with Tom’s character, but we don’t know too much. Then we must also let the plot come on the tracks, and at the end of the first episode, determine that the character of Mark will investigate a series of robberies under the direction of Tom’s character. We had to determine the double songs of the story, the double tracks of the entire series – the emotional life of these characters and then the procedural element of the show.

We get a real sense of the domestic life of Robbie and Maeve in the episode and the warmth and chaos of their house. What do you remember about filming those scenes?

Tom Pelphrey: It was beautiful. It was there in a place called Downningtown. It was a bit of a ride where we were normally filming things. But it was great because it was the actual house. There was no recreation somewhere on a stage. Our regular decorators have done so incredibly. It felt like this, until the messiness of how the toy was not stored. That made our work easier.

Emilia Jones: I liked to film there because nobody had a telephone connection. There was no distraction. We could all really use it. We were entertaining the children between scenes and takes. We all just hung around constantly. That helped us to bind. That was important because we should be a close family.

That is due to the scene where Maeve made the dinner with the recipe from Ree Drummond and nobody wants to eat her food.

Jones: Maeve spends a lot of time on cooking and cleaning and tries to create structure for these children. And then Robbie comes in and rumbles with it. Maeve is tired. She is really, really tired. But those scenes were much nicer to photograph than I thought they would be. I constantly reminded myself: “I’m tired, I don’t like it.” I had a good time, you know? I mean, Oliver [Eisenson]That Wyatt plays, says a lot of ‘chicken kitchen’ in the show, and he also said it a lot of the camera. Our director, Jeremiah Zagar, did a lot of handheld things and followed us around, which helped make it more chaotic.

Maeve’s frustration with her life comes out in the scene where she first goes into a date in Forever and brings a man home. What does she hope for when her evening starts?

Jones: Maeve feels stuck and loses a little feeling of identity. She is very excited to hang around with someone who is new outside of her family and not about farts and talking like that. She is tired of always picking up after the people in her family – first her father, and now Robbie while walking in criminal activities. When Robbie doesn’t let her go out and has some fun on her date, she just understands. Maeve tries to be patient because she loves family.

What does it say about Robbie that he confuses her evening around the room of his niece?

Pelphrey: Well, you go there. Robbie almost summarizes that. He just goes a walk through the house and checks whether all chickens are laid to rest. He becomes a bit nostalgic and then he is in a bad situation.

Are there parallels between the character of Mark Ruffalo and the struggles that Tom’s character experiences?

Ingelby: There are parallels. As the story builds, you will find even more parallels to the point where the two characters collide. It is a story about two fathers, while “mare” was a story about mothers. It is also about two boys who process losses in different ways. With Robbie it is the loss of his brother and the absence of his wife and the real uncertainty about whether she will ever come home. With Tom it understands a deep loss in his life. They both love their families and try to take care of their families. They feel that they might abandon their families. The deeper the show goes, the more you start seeing how close these characters are. When they finally have scenes together, they see that too and discover these pieces that they connect.

What was it about shooting the invasion of the drug house, which is spectacular off-the-rails?

Pelphrey: That was our first week. Jeremiah had mapped exactly what we were going to do. He knew how he wanted the frame to be filled, when the camera moved, where and why. We have rehearsed its physical effect, so that the timing ran synchronously with the cameraman. Wearing the mask was cool. It is a powerful thing not to have your face to express something. You have to think about how you use your body; How your head run in a certain way helps to communicate something to the audience that you do not do with your voice and that you cannot do with your eyes.

The violence is really cruel.

Ingelby: The idea was to encourage the audience to love Rob. But then the audience must understand the effort in the game. The structure of the first episode is a bit of a build. It does not start with crime and then we are in the immediate aftermath. We actually live pretty with the characters and we come into their lives. And then only at the end of the episode it is interrupted by this violence that is surprising. Then it is as: “Oh, wow.” These are the consequences of what they have done. Because at that moment we really like Robbie and Clinton in the story. We are a bit so much: “These guys are cool. I can hang out with peaches.” And now one of our crew is dead, and now they have this little boy they have to take care of. We wanted it to be really violent. I even spoke with Jeremiah and we went over the gun swallow moment. Every time we talked about that, I said it really had to be shocking. We have done something similar in “Mare”, where the body does not pop up until the end of the first episode. In “Task” it is a kind of character piece, and at the end the plot gets stuck.

Can you talk about the last image of Robbie who returns home with the child in his arms?

Ingelby: We wanted to end with that spooky shot where you think: “What is happening in that house?” We wanted to leave the audience with the door that closes and she would let it go: “Oh my God.” We need them to have a restless quality when the credits roll.