Note: The following story contains spoilers from “Task” Season 1, Episode 6.
From early on in the process of filming Brad Ingelsby’s “Task,” Tom Pelphrey understood the motivations and desires of his character, Robbie Prendergrast, a single dad and trash collector moonlighting as a thief.
“He’s so well defined in the sense that his North Star is so clear: his family and taking care of his children,” Pelphrey told TheWrap, applauding Ingelsby’s dedication to the character study. “The reason why a character does anything is paramount to him, and oftentimes, once you try and fit that into a tight genre, which ‘Task’ kind of is, you start sacrificing some of those character things. But Brad refuses … he’ll never sacrifice the character for the plot.”
It’s Robbie’s commitment to his family that lands him at the center of an FBI investigation, led by Mark Ruffalo’s Tom Brandis and his ragtag task force, who work tirelessly to find Sam, the little boy kidnapped by Robbie during a raid-gone-wrong. But Pelphrey doesn’t classify taking Sam as kidnapping, given his other options, saying “as an actor … you become the deepest advocate of your character … If you’re judging, you’re not doing your job right.”
“What Brad does brilliantly in this show in particular is present a series of impossible situations where there’s really no good choice for anyone involved, and then they have to make a choice that they believe is at least a little bit better than the other bad choice,” Pelphrey said. “There’s not a lot of choices that Robbie’s making where I’m like, ‘what would the better choice have looked like?’”
Through most of “Task,” Robbie and Tom operate as dueling protagonists, with Robbie just out of reach from Tom’s FBI task force until they finally cross paths in Episode 5, when Tom shows up at Robbie’s front door. Robbie quickly realizes Tom’s motives and subsequently holds him at gunpoint as he forces him to drive him nearby his rendezvous point for his drug deal, but, despite Tom expecting to die there and then, Robbie lets him go nearby a local beach full of people.
Despite this shortcomings, it’s these moments where Robbie’s unwavering values come through that give him redemption for Pelphrey.
“He has a very clear value system that he’s following no matter what he’s doing and however crazy it might be or however violent things might be, he’s only doing what he needs to do in his mind to provide for his children,” Pelphrey said. “He’s not interested in any unnecessary suffering. He doesn’t want anybody to be hurt or killed … it’s admirable the discipline of that and and he follows that through to the end, because that’s at the core of who he is.”
That same mercy and care is shown by Tom to Robbie in Episode 6, when Tom intercepts Robbie at the site of his drug deal, which is nixed when both the Dark Hearts and the FBI show up in the woods.
“They’re made from similar stuff — I think they’re both good guys, and I think they both have similar values, and … it didn’t take Tom long to realize that Robbie is just caught in some very bad circumstances,” Pelphrey said, noting that Tom’s background as a priest gives him an empathy not expected from an FBI agent. “It’s beautiful and perhaps not surprising that Tom immediately sees in Robbie, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go out of my way to hurt this person, he’s not a bad guy.’”
Despite Tom’s best efforts to de-escalate the situation, Robbie gets away, quickly finding his real target: Jayson (Sam Keeley). Robbie unleashes hell on him for killing his brother, Billy, with vindication for the death taking over.
“By that point, the wheels are so in motion that that’s just survival … I don’t know how much choice is involved anymore at that point,” Pelphrey said. “Everything has been set in motion, and now we’re going to try and get out of this alive.”
Tragically, Robbie doesn’t make it out of the woods unscathed after Jayson planted a deep knife wound in his torso. Tom quickly finds Robbie and rushes him to the hospital, but Robbie dies in the car on the way there, laying in Tom’s arms in a scene recalls as “challenging” yet “beautiful.”
“I was just so in love with the role and the job … but you just have to play the physical reality of what’s happening, which was challenging; I’ve never really had to do that one before, certainly not on on camera,” Pelphrey said. “It was just a lot of just trying to stay as relaxed as possible … Mark was lovely, and because we were in a car, there wasn’t really people around us.”
Pelphrey said that Robbie is “as at peace as he could be” upon his death, and hopes for Maeve and his kids that they “live in peace and not be so consumed with the need to survive that it reduces their joy in humanity.”
“If you make people fight for their very survival, it’s hard to judge,” he said. “That’s the kind of conversation that something like this can can lead to — It’s certainly a lot of the things I was thinking about when we were doing it … [with] Robbie thinking about providing for his family, it’s like, ‘I’m gonna do my best to make sure you’re never in the position that I had to be in to make these kind of choices in the first place.’”
“Task” airs Sundays at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
