When Tom Met Robbie on ‘Task’: Inside the Creation of One of the Year’s Best Episodes of TV
It’s the moment “Task” has been building toward: the inevitable collision of FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) and Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), the man he’s been chasing.
“If the show was leading up to a collision, if every episode was slowly inching these guys closer together, I got exceptionally worried at some point it has to really pay off,” said creator Brad Ingelsby on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It can’t just be okay; it needs to be epic. [It has to] pay off not just in the plot, but in terms of all the character arcs.”
With so much riding on one conversation, how to pull it off from a script and shooting standpoint was no small task. Here’s Ingelsby and executive producer Jeremiah Zagar, who directed episode 5, breaking down the car scene and why it served as the series’ turning point, setting up the last two episodes.
So, Why in a Car?
In “Heat,” which inspired the story structure of “Task,” Robert De Niro’s thief and Al Pacino’s cop famously meet face-to-face at a diner, which begs the question: why a car? To start, there were practical plot considerations Ingelsby had to take into account with the big scene’s setting – it would need to take place in the woods, Tom’s back-up would need to be minutes away – but a car also served his dramatic needs.
“We wanted that scene, where they finally meet, [for them to be] stuck together,” said Ingelsby. “They can’t really move. They have to be in this place.”
Zagar believed having the two men not face one another (Robbie in the back seat with gun, Tom in the front being forced to drive) was conducive to what documentary filmmakers refer to as a “campfire” moment — put another way, creating a situation where your subjects can speak intimately, and in a way they wouldn’t otherwise, not unlike when people gather around a campfire. He made the comparison to how NPR’s Fresh Air host Terry Gross conducts her interviews.
“What the scene allows is that idea of that Terry Gross thing — interviewing her subjects without seeing them,” said Zagar of how Gross famously interviews her guests from a different studio in Philadelphia. “There’s something very uninhibited about that; suddenly, they’re free to not look in each other’s eyes and to have a conversation that’s internal, like they’re talking to each other, but also to themselves, to the heart of what they’re experiencing.”
Zagar believes the intimacy Pelphrey and Ruffalo achieved in their performance wouldn’t have been possible if they had faked the driving on a stage, while also admitting his insistence on shooting the lengthy dialogue scene in an actual moving vehicle through the streets of Pennsylvania, with the summer sun beating down, was a production nightmare and “a total pain in the ass.”
“I was obsessed with live driving, I hate stages, I hate green screen,” said Zagar. “And so we did it real that day and it was like a hundred degrees. I think Tom Pelphrey almost killed me.”
Breaking Through
Ingelsby went into writing the episode knowing where he wanted to land with his two protagonists and the unusual bond they formed after their fateful drive.
“I wanted them to find a common ground, so that when Robbie arrives in the woods at the end, and drops him off, he recognizes something of Tom. He says, ‘You’re a decent man, Tom. Now walk away in those woods,’” said Ingelsby. “We wanted to make it about a connection, but in a very earned way.”
But how to get there, and get the two men to open up to each other in a gradual, “earned” way, was not easy. After all, Robbie is a wanted man, holding a gun to the head of the federal agent who has been hunting him. While on the podcast, Ingelsby told IndieWire he wrote a countless number of drafts of the car sequence, many far longer in length than what aired on HBO this past weekend, and pointed to discovering the one key moment that cracked things open.
“Robbie asked Tom, ‘Hey, you gave last rites in the hospital, right? You were a priest?’ And Tom says, ‘Yes.’ And he says, ‘You saw people die, right?’ And Tom goes, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Were they scared?’ And Tom says, ‘Every single one,’” said Ingelsby, recalling his favorite script moment. “So I think the honesty he gives Robbie in that answer it helps Robbie to open up in a way.”
According to Ingelsby, leaning into Tom being a former priest, played by the always empathetic Ruffalo, was key, as the character is far better equipped to receive a person in crisis – with experience of offering comfort and the potential for forgiveness when people are at their lowest – compared to your average FBI agent. And it’s through his conversation with Tom, that Robbie confesses to seeing himself as a vagrant bird, unable to find its way home again.
The Crossing of Character Arcs
It’s this moment, where both Zagar and Ingelsby say the two characters’ arcs cross paths as they are headed in the opposite direction.
As IndieWire wrote about the first two episodes of “Task,” Tom and Robbie are introduced as being in a very similar station of life — single fathers of three, grieving, coming upon a year since losing their wives. But how Ingelsby wrote, and Zagar visually built, the two characters’ worlds were in sharp contrast, as they were dealing with their grief in opposite ways: Robbie is full of life and given purpose with his vengeful plot to steal from the Dark Hearts, while Tom has lost his way and is living in a visual void.
“We made a choice where Robbie believes he can get out of everything. He believes it, and then there’s this scene,” said Ingelsby, discussing the vagrant bird line, from which the episode takes its name (“Vagrant”).
The shift is even more dramatic for Tom. Ingelsby once again points to a simple, single line of dialogue, when Robbie forces Tom out of the car, which made the shift possible: “I need to talk to my son.”
“He’s been avoiding that the whole show. He literally says to somebody, ‘My son’s been in jail for 13 months. I haven’t been to see him once,’” said Ingelsby. “And in that moment, where he believes he’s going to die, he says, ‘I have to talk to my son.’ And it’s through this journey with Robbie that he’s activated in a way.”
Added Zagar, “What Brad did is Robbie unlocks this realization that Tom wants to live. It’s the first time he’s understood he desperately wants to live. He’s sleepwalking through life until then in some ways.”
Both collaborators marvelled at how Ruffalo’s walk and the way he had physically carried his character’s burdens shifted after Robbie let him go. Suddenly, Tom is also far better at his job, quickly telling his team to track Robbie via the car’s Sirius Satellite, and administering sharp orders on where to go and what to do.
“He embraces that side of his character that he had been avoiding, and that was the turning point,” said Zagar, who both calls the episode his favorite, and the one where he, as director, had to do the least — referring to the car scene as one of only two scenes in the entire series he just had to get out of the way of the script and let the actors rip.
“[Episode] 5 was a masterpiece from the moment [Brad] wrote it,” said Zagar, pointing to the episode’s final image: “Guns pointed at each other. I think the whole crux of the show was that right there.”
Episode 6 of “Task” airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, October 12.
To make sure you don’t miss Brad Ingelsby‘s October 20 interview about “Task,” subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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