<em>Task</em> Gave Tom Pelphrey the Role of a Lifetime. It's Been a Long Time Coming.

Tom Pelphrey knew his Philly accent needed the power of a thousand Tush Pushes. A Delco dialect so region-specific that it's spoken in only three Wawas across the Keystone State. Intonation that makes wooter ice sound like royal English. Each individual sentence should—no, it must—have the power to fix Joel Embiid's meniscus. Or, at the absolute least, win another Super Bowl for the Eagles.

"That was keeping me up at night," Pelphrey tells me, deadly serious. "I was like, If this sounds bad, I'm gonna jump off the bridge."

We're at the Warren Street Hotel in Lower Manhattan, enjoying a late brunch on a Thursday morning in August. The 43-year-old actor stars in Task, a new HBO series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby. Like Mare, Task is a gritty crime drama set in—you've certainly inferred this by now—the Greater Philadelphia Area. Also like Mare, it demands its cast to adopt an accent drenched in Yuengling and Cheez Whiz, nearly to the point of parody. But this is no SNL sketch. (Even if SNL famously parodied Mare.)

In Task, Pelphrey stars as Robbie Prendergrast, a good-intentioned father who develops a nasty habit for raiding local drug houses under the cover of darkness. It puts him at odds with FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), who is asked to develop a task force to investigate the crimes. Cue all sorts of peak HBO Sunday-night antics, including heavily tattooed gangs, a searing dual portrait of grief, and awe-striking performances from Pelphrey and Ruffalo. The series debuts the first of its seven episodes on Sunday night.

For Pelphrey, this moment is something to savor for as long as he can. He knows how rare the hurricane of a mega-talented cast, uber-literary script, and huge platform is nowadays. "A thing like Task is truly in the fucking stars," Pelphrey says. "It's people at the right time doing the right thing. You can't replicate it. You can't write it out on paper and make it happen again. I was literally just talking with Brad about this last night and he knows it, too."

But if you've seen Pelphrey in just about anything from his twenty-some-year-long career in film and television, you know that this moment—top billing in a prestige HBO drama that the network will certainly submit in every Emmy category imaginable—is a long time coming for the actor. Simply, because you don't forget a Tom Pelphrey performance. Among his many superpowers is a deftness at playing the exact kind of character he brings to life in Task: raw, big-hearted men at odds with themselves, capable of going from unadulterated joy to complete devastation in a split second. In Ozark, he played Ben Davis, a live wire whose reappearance—and struggles with bipolar disorder—throws the Byrde family into chaos. His turn in season 3 earned him a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. The gone-too-soon Outer Range saw Pelphrey as Perry Abbott, a son of a ranch owner whose unchecked anger kick-starts the events of the series. Other stops on the road to Task? Standout roles in Banshee, Love and Death, Mank, and A Man in Full.

This isn't my first meeting with Pelphrey. In the spring of 2022, I Zoomed with the actor near the end of Outer Range season 1. What started as a breezy chat about the New York Giants (Pelphrey hails from New Jersey) and small-screen cowboy life slowly turned into something more. Pelphrey told me he lost his father when he was twenty-five; I had just lost mine the prior month. We talked about the dreams he had of his dad after he passed—vivid, naturalistic, undeniable—and what helped his grief. "I look back on that period and, man, I was struggling and I was in a lot of pain," he told me at the time. "I miss my dad, but I'm grateful for the man that lets you become."

It took all of three and a half years for me to learn—over eggs, bacon, and too much coffee at the Warren—that Pelphrey was then going through an earth-shaking life change of his own.

Fatherhood has changed Pelphrey’s life—for good. "All I cared about when I was done [with Task} was getting the fuck home and being a dad for at least a few months," he says.

"Straight-up, when I first got sent the script, Kaley was bored, and she was like, 'Let me read it'—and..." Pelphrey stops himself, hunches over, and looks at me. Something flashes over him. "God, my life has changed so much since we spoke last. Soon as I said that, I was like, I remember exactly where I was last time I talked to you."

Pelphrey is trying to tell me the story of how he won his role in Task, but—for one of dozens of times during our two hours together—we go somewhere else. This is why just about every Tom Pelphrey character wears his heart on his sleeve. That's just Pelphrey. Big laugh, bigger smile, now fully visible after shaving Robbie Prendergrast's tumbleweed of a beard. He's easily diverted from work talk to meditations on Jung, technology's effect on the brain, and how damn good rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart looked for the Giants this preseason.

But, yes, the mention of his future fiancée—the actress Kaley Cuoco—brings him back to 2022, when he met her at the Ozark season 4 premiere. Pelphrey had just wrapped filming the HBO miniseries Love and Death, where he played the real-life attorney Don Crowder. He drove up to New York with his dog, Blue, with plans to stop by the premiere and head to his home upstate that night. Pelphrey's manager had other plans. Why don't you stay and get a hotel room? she asked. He resisted at first, then figured it'd be nice to see friends in the city. "It turns out she was setting us up," he says. "Me meeting Kaley? It was instant. It was love at first sight."

Pelphrey felt like he'd been working nonstop up until that point. He didn't even know what a relationship would look like in his life until he met Cuoco. He graduated from the Rutgers University theatre program in 2004, then held a role in the CBS soap opera Guiding Light until its series finale in 2009. Success came slowly. This was the era in New York City, Pelphrey remembers, when you could still piece together rent money from theater gigs and Law and Order. (He did both.) When Pelphrey turned thirty-two, he was cast in Cinemax's Banshee, which would mark his first recurring series regular role. He had some what-ifs along the way, including an audition for Jonathan Groff's role in David Fincher's Mindhunter. It eventually landed him a part in Fincher's 2020 film, Mank. But sometime after Ozark put him on a new trajectory—one with meaty roles suited to his talents—he was ready for something more.

"That feeling starts to grow in you that says, 'This is great, but there must be more than this,'" Pelphrey says of the time before he met Cuoco. "You want to share it. And we met and fell in love. Then I had to go back to Texas like a week later, just for like two days. That's when you and I first spoke. Right in that time."

Their daughter, Matilda, was born in March 2023. "Suddenly, I was like, Now I really know what it's like to be grateful," he says. "Every day that she's okay, I have a fucking gratitude that I never even knew I could have before. Now I know what it's really like when your fucking whole apparatus is outside of your body."

At this point, Pelphrey has hardly touched his omelette. But we've properly caught up—soulmate, baby, deep gratitude—so we can safely return to Cuoco reading the script for Task. "She said, this is one of the best scripts I've read for television," Pelphrey remembers. "I agreed. But then she said, 'Did [Ingelsby] write this for you?'" Pelphrey filmed a couple audition tapes, sent them to Ingelsby and his co-executive producer Jeremiah Zagar, and had the role soon after.

Ingelsby did not write the part for Pelphrey, but he might as well have. Robbie Prendergrast is full of longing, demons, dreams, and unrealized potential. He lives with his niece, Maeve (Emelia Jones), and his two young children. Pelphrey brings Robbie's desperation to build a better life for himself—and his family—to aching life. And when the character veers down the wrong path, inevitably running into Ruffalo's FBI agent, we see Pelphrey look every bit the heavyweight opposite the Spotlight actor. "In every way, he's so generous," Pelphrey says of his co-star. "He's so wonderful and alive and silly. Everybody loves being around him, but then acting with him—he's so talented. He holds a space. Definitely held the space for me. I imagine he does it for all of his partners."

Now, I won't leave you hanging on the secret to Pelphrey's Philly accent—which is freakishly good. Pelphrey had a dialect coach, of course. Someone on the Task set introduced him to a "true-blue Delco" guy as well, but the person knew Pelphrey was listening for his accent. He needed the real deal, unfiltered. The thing that broke it open? He found a clip on YouTube—the local news interviewed a Philadelphian about a fire on his street—and one single sentence taught Pelphrey how, sometimes, six words can simply merge into one long drawl. "I watched this video a million times," Pelphrey says. "But he said something like, 'So it happened down the road.' The guy goes, 'Sow it happen dahn the rohhd.' He only used it once."

Really, Pelphrey is more thankful for the man who brought Delco lingo to the mainstream in the first place: Brad Ingelsby, who grew up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. "I love all of his work, and I think if Brad has a calling card—aside from constantly exploring an infinite variety of what family means—is that he treats every character with dignity," Pelphrey says. "Every character has a why."

So, what's Pelphrey's why? I ask him about his next role and he says there isn't one. And it doesn't sound like—barring another you-simply-have-to-do-this script reading from Cuoco—he's angling to step in front of a camera anytime soon. Why? Well, the why is his only why: Matilda. When she was born, something shifted inside of Pelphrey.

"All I cared about when I was done was getting the fuck home and being a dad for at least a few months," he says. "That's all I want. It's my favorite thing to do—I just want to be around. I want to do fun shit with her."

Before Pelphrey can return to fun shit with Matilda, we have ground left to cover. At this point, we're still picking at our eggs, Pelphrey is checking in on a fantasy football draft between bathroom breaks, and the coffee's still flowing. What else can happen in three and a half years? You realize the gift of humility, understand everything that sobriety gave you, and what it means to fall apart and put yourself back together again.

In Pelphrey’s view, what makes Mare of Easttown and Task creator Brad Ingelsby such a special writer? "Every character has a why," he says.

ESQUIRE: Anything else you want to say about Task before we move on?

TOM PELPHREY: What you see in the show is—like, always what you see from Brad [Ingelsby]—it's certainly very alive. Brad is determined to make sure everybody has a very good reason for doing whatever they're doing. Every single character, whether you call them good or bad, are coming from, a very real place of need for what they're trying to get it. [The waitress approaches and asks if we'd like anything else.] You know what? Can we have another thing of that coffee, please? How much coffee you drinking?

I'm about halfway through mine.

We'll do a large. Thank you so much.

Knowing you since Ozark, you've been acting at the level we see in Task for a long time. I hope people see it.

This is where I'm so grateful for all the experiences I've had. The humility it teaches you is real, because what you finally understand is that the chance to do the thing I love in that kind of setting is the end goal. To get to have that experience is so fulfilling in and of itself. I'm already beyond satisfied before the show even comes out.

You feel fulfilled, in general?

Totally feeling fulfilled. But then in terms of what makes something successful, there is so much that is so wildly out of your fucking hands. When you get in a situation like Task—like Ozark was—I've been in so many great situations with so many amazing people. Some things hit, some things don't... You always do your best to take responsibility for what you can control, and I take that very seriously. But then there's so much of this that is out outside the scope of anything I can control.

Can you pinpoint the moment when you felt like you reached that place?

So, God willing, October 1 of this year, I'll be twelve years sober.

Congrats, Tom.

Thanks, bro. I haven't really talked about it much publicly. It's like a deep surrendering in many ways of the things that I thought I was in control of, good or bad. The peace that came with that was instant confirmation that that was the right idea.

What was really hard was thinking the other way; this idea, which is an utter fallacy, that you can just control everything. Now, I'm talking specifically about work, but realizing the peace of: I will make the best decisions I can make with whatever's available to me at that time. What is success to me is literally just a greater ability to make better choices in terms of the stuff that you have access to.

"That feeling starts to grow in you that says, ’This is great, but there must be more than this,’" Pelphrey says of the time before he met his fiancée, Kaley Cuoco. "You want to share it."

That's ringing true with me right now. A lot of that came with finally coming to a point where I could really process emotions.

Right. You realize at a certain age—and this is no one's fault—but there is so much vitally important shit that no one taught us, and our parents didn't have it. It's no one's fault because they didn't have it to give.

It becomes about how to accumulate the tools to basically deal with everything.

I was literally having dinner last night with Raúl Castillo [who plays Cliff, Robbie's partner in Task]. We were talking about how you grow into this understanding. The very same thing that you might consider a bad quality—there is another side to that coin which might well make it your greatest. You get beyond good or bad and you start going like, I have this quality that I don't like that makes life difficult in this way, but it also makes life special in this way.

Things get better when you can get that level of thinking.

Yes, you can really start to heal. Because I don't think it's ever about becoming perfect. We'll never do it. This is from Carl Jung, but he's like, "It's about becoming whole." It's about just knowing your complete self and allowing it all.

It's like Severance. You're putting all sides of yourself together again.

It's also just inherently more compassionate if we can look at ourselves that way. The second we can start evaluating ourselves that way, that's how we start to evaluate other people. If it's more loving, more compassionate, and more generous? It allows for more.