Following a screening of season one’s penultimate episode in New York on Thursday, Task star Mark Ruffalo and creator Brad Ingelsby along with costars — including Tom Pelphrey, Emilia Jones, Fabien Frankel, Thuso Mbedu, Alison Oliver, and Martha Plimpton — joined executive producers and directors Salli Richardson-Whitfield and Mark Roybal to discuss what drew them to the series and how Ingelsby’s “terrific” writing delivered a season exploring faith, family, fatherhood and forgiveness.

“I was really interested in a character who lost his faith. My uncle was a priest. He left the priesthood, and we have lots of conversations about how his ideas of God have changed over the years. That really interested me, a man who’s lost his faith,” the Task showrunner and creator told the DGA Theater. “On the other side of that, a man who has faith of a different kind, a belief in himself to get out of this situation. Mare [of Easttown] was a story of mothers, I felt, and this, this was a story about dads.”

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Unlike Mare, Ingelsby “didn’t want to do a whodunit. We had done that before. So I got into this idea of a collision course. These two guys, who, each episode, get a little bit closer, and the tension of the show is that as they inch towards this collision, we’re scared, and it’s because we love them both in different ways. We want Robby to get away, and we want Tom to get him, and we know those things aren’t going to be able to [co]exist.”

Pelphrey likened reading that collision for the first time — to tears at 2:30 a.m. during a family Thanksgiving in Florida — to rereading tragedies. “Sometimes, great tragedy is the thing that you know you see coming, and yet you, with all of your might, hope doesn’t happen,” he said. “But you kind of know it will. It’s like rereading Romeo and Juliet, and you’re like, ‘This time!’ Reading Task [scripts] felt that way to me.”

“It has such a pulse. It has all those elements. It has this action, it has the intrigue, it has the investigation, and then it just sneaks up on you with this empathy. It’s because he approaches each character with that kind of empathy. So you have the black and white of the law, and then you have the human beings who have to live in that structure and everything that that takes,” Ruffalo said. “You’re tricky. You made a cops and robbers show about empathy.”

Ingelsby’s character-driven writing style is a big part of why actress Mbedu was attracted to the role of Aleah Clinton and the series itself. “When your team comes to you … they try to sell you on why you should do this thing. And in reading the scripts, I was like, even if I just wiped the screen, I would want to be a part of this project, because it’s so well written and it’s a beautiful story.”

For Task’s creator, it’s ultimately a character-driven story that explores his own relationship to being fathered, fatherhood, and family.

“Writing is just a way for me to exercise my own fears and insecurities. I wanted to be different than my dad, and I see that I’m making the same mistakes. ‘I’m gonna do things differently.’ I’m not doing them differently at all,” he recalled telling someone recently. “So I think what was [also] really important was to give the kids a voice. It was to really represent the kids in the story … exploring the kids and the effect the parents have on the children, and really trying to give the kids a voice and a perspective in the show and not just have them be in the background.”

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