Brad Ingelsby, Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey. Emilio Madrid Logo text After Mark Ruffalo wrapped I Know This Much Is True, the 2020 HBO limited series based on Wally Lamb's tragic novel about a paranoid schizophrenic man in the wake of a violent breakdown, he decided he needed a break from heavy material. He was looking for a comedy, but the comedies weren't coming. He made Poor Things and All the Light We Cannot See and then HBO came calling again - with a show centered around a grieving FBI agent. "They were like, 'I think we might break him,'" Ruffalo says with a laugh. But the actor read the script and was instantly captivated by the depth of the lead character. "It described this habit he has of swirling his drink with his finger and then licking and shaking it, and I was like, who is this guy who does that?" he says. "I loved it. And I loved a screenwriter who had the insight to write something so idiosyncratic." Related Stories TV 'Task' Review: Mark Ruffalo Leads Unrelentingly Glum HBO Crime Drama From 'Mare of Easttown' Creator Movies Kate Winslet's Directorial Debut 'Goodbye June' Gets December Release, First Look That screenwriter was Brad Ingelsby, best known for his blockbuster Kate Winslet-starrer Mare of Easttown. The series followed the titular Mare as she investigated a brutal murder in her small Northeast Pennsylvania town; it scored Inglesby an Emmy nomination (Winslet won for outstanding lead actress in a limited series) and an overall deal with HBO. (There have been calls for a follow up ever since.) He was looking to create another show based in Delaware County - or "DelCo," as its known locally and in Inglesby's work - and came up with the story that became Task. Whereas Mare of Easttown was a whodunit, Task is more of a cops-and-robbers tale. Its protagonists are Tom Brandis, a former priest-turned-FBI agent, and Robbie Prendergast, a single father who uses his garbage route as cover to scope out drug houses to rob. Brandis is put in charge of a task force assigned to break the string of robberies just as Robbie starts zeroing in on the haul that, he believes, will give his family a fresh start. "The tension of the story is that you care about both of these guys," says Ingelsby. "You want Robbie to get away and you want Tom to get a win. But you know that can't happen." Mark Ruffalo and Fabien Frankel in Task. Ingelsby tries not to write his scripts with specific actors in mind ("It's a recipe for disaster, because you can get attached to someone and then they're busy doing a Marvel movie for three years") but as the character of Tom Brandis came together on the page - inspired in part by Ingelsby's uncle, who is himself an ex-priest - he realized he needed someone extremely specific. "The guy's from the Northeast, he's humble, he has a very specific perspective on life, and he has adopted children," he says. "You start to go, 'Wait, who is believable as this?' It's a narrow list, and Mark Ruffalo was at the top of it." Ingelsby and director Jeremiah Zagar took the actor out to dinner in New York. "I wanted to get a sense of who I was going to be spending the next big chunk of my life with," Ruffalo says of their first meeting. "And we really hit it off." The part of Robbie Prendergast was more difficult. They were looking for someone with the physicality to be believable as a criminal, but the tenderness to be a father the audience can get behind. And, much like the leads in Mare of Easttown, he has a very heavy - and very specific - DelCo accent. They found all that in Tom Pelphrey, who had recently received an Emmy nomination for his recurring guest role as Laura Linney's bi-polar brother on Ozark. Producers sent him the script for the first episode of Task, but it was actually Pelphrey's partner Kaley Cuoco who first saw the potential. "She wanted something to read, and I was like, 'Well I have this [Task] script,' and she read it and was like, 'This is one of the best TV scripts I've ever seen,'" he says. "And then she was like, 'Did it write this for you?'" Pelphrey grew up in New Jersey, and describes a shared blue collar sensibility with Ingelsby's version of northern Pennsylvania. "It doesn't happen very often, I don't think it's happened to me since Ozark, but when I read it I just knew that I understood this guy," he says. "I can feel it, and I can hear it, I felt like I couldn't make a bad turn." He put a few scenes on tape, and then showed up to a Zoom with Ingelsby and Zagar with the grown-out beard and hair that has become a staple of his in-between-jobs look, and the role was his. Tom Pelphrey and Raúl Castillo in Task. Like Mare before it, Ingelsby filmed Task on location in and around Delaware County. After a strike-induced work stoppage, production took place during the spring and summer of 2024. Ruffalo had been daydreaming about Tom Brandis since he signed on, and he arrived to his first costume fitting with the request that he be 30-40 pounds heavier. After a mo