By the end of Task, the latest “Academy Awards favorite plays law enforcement” series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, audiences may have been impressed with Mark Ruffalo‘s performance as a former priest-turned-special agent, but that guy’s always good. Who person it seemed like everybody was talking about, however, was Tom Pelphrey.
Known for his early work on Guiding Light — for which he won two Daytime Emmys — his stint on Ozark and as the fiancé of Kaley Cuoco, Pelphrey entered Task positioned to directly square off against Ruffalo, playing the De Niro to his Pacino to use a Heat analogy. And he put up a real fight as Robbie, the garbage man who moonlights as a trap house thief and the surprise heart of Task.
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Pelphrey spoke with Gold Derby about his early days on soaps, the unlikely audition that got him the Task job, and what his career has felt like since.
Gold Derby: You got your start on soap operas, with Guiding Light. What’s something that people might not understand about the work that goes into making a soap?
Tom Pelphrey: We were filming 55 pages a day. The soaps were unique in the fact that they would air every day, no matter what. Even if the soap got interrupted by news breaking news or something, it wouldn’t replay later. That was just it. It was this unstoppable train where every day there’s a new hour of the show, all year long. And so production obviously needs to match that pace. We worked five days a week, typically 7 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m. every day, and you worked 51 weeks a year. We had off the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Do you still feel like that actor, the one filming 55 pages a day?
No, it’s been so long. The good and the bad were two sides of the same coin. You learn to shoot from your hip because it’s the only f–king option you have. You have to be on instinct. There’s no f–king time. But as soon as I finished, I got right back into a class with a teacher I knew from Rutgers to get back into my body, slowing down and working deep, not shooting from the hip so much anymore, how to spend time with the material, how to let it sink in, how to literally stop myself from racing to get it because you miss so much stuff that way.
I read that you self-taped your audition from Task. What do you remember from that day?
There were two scenes from the first episode, and I thought about it being in front of a white f–king wall, and I was like, “F–k this.” There’s nothing about this that wants to feel like I’m sitting in a f–king chair in a room with good lighting. Kaley came home one day, and I’d thrown my iPhone on a tripod in the yard. We went out against the side of the house. It was like an overcast day, and it was really f–king windy, and there were dogs barking in the distance, and I knew the sound would be sh-t, and I didn’t f–king care. I literally did, I think, one take of each scene. The whole thing took six minutes. And I was like, “That’s it.” It looks right, it feels right, it’s dirty. It’s not f–king perfect, just like the whole script is dirty.
In Episode 5, your character and Mark Ruffalo’s finally face off. When did you film that in the course of production?
Luckily, the way it worked out, we did Episode 5 almost chronologically, much closer to the end.
How do you approach the scene that the entire season to that point has been leading to?
It was certainly one of the scenes I was most looking forward to for a million reasons. To get to work with Mark, who’s an actor I’ve admired for years and years and years, was exciting. I thought that whole sequence was so brave of Brad to write it like that. When you consider what’s happening in the show and the stakes and the mounting tension and the fact that at that point in the show, all the worlds are about to collide and explode, it took a certain amount of craft, but also bravery to say on the eve of the collision of everything, I’m going to put my two main characters in a car, and they’re going to drive and talk for like half the episode. They don’t even look at each other. The beauty of it was Brad writes us a scene between two men who are getting to just know each other with this very surface level dialog, which is a f-cking dream come true, because it’s like, this is how it goes in life. Sometimes we could have insane worlds of truth and emotion and consequence just churning through our bodies. But the situation is such that, like, I’m gonna ask you how you met your wife.
You’ve spoken a lot about learning the Delco accent. Did you have any trouble dropping it?
I didn’t think so until last week. I haven’t worked since Task. I wanted to be home, and I went and did this indie last week. I had to do a Texas accent. It was fine, and then I said a word, and it wasn’t the “o” sound, it was like one of the “an” sounds like. In the middle of my f–king Texas accent, I was like “an.”
You said in a previous interview that success is the ability to have a choice. Have you felt that in the wake of Task?
There’s been stages and steps along the way where you just feel a difference in the material that I might have access to, or the feeling of certain things being more possible than in the past. This time, an exciting thing that’s starting to happen that I very much feel excited about, ready for, and also ready to transition to is a things coming now that are not fully formed, where people say, “We have this thing,” and some of them are really cool, and it’s like, “Oh, I want to be a part of building this with you.”
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