Mark Ruffalo battles faith crisis, crime, and 'craziest' Pennsylvania accent in new show Task (ex...

&34;It's got a great pulse. It's moving, it's exciting,&34; Ruffalo tells EW of the sevenpart limited series. &34;Yes, you're going to get your heart torn out.&

"It's got a great pulse. It's moving, it's exciting," Ruffalo tells EW of the seven-part limited series. "Yes, you're going to get your heart torn out."

Mark Ruffalo battles faith crisis, crime, and 'craziest' Pennsylvania accent in new show *Task *(exclusive)

"It's got a great pulse. It's moving, it's exciting," Ruffalo tells EW of the seven-part limited series. "Yes, you're going to get your heart torn out."

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August 26, 2025 10:30 a.m. ET

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- Mark Ruffalo teams with *Mare of Easttown *writer Brad Ingelsby for the HBO limited series *Task*.

- EW's exclusive preview sees the Marvel star playing an ex-priest leading an FBI task force into a Pennsylvania crime ring.

- Ruffalo says his own struggle with religion makes him believe there's a "benevolent being overseeing mankind's struggles."

*Task* is a rare crime thriller that aims to get in your face, under your skin, and into the deepest corners of your heart with characters its makers hope your eyes might overlook.

"The people that know you in life are essentially invisible," the limited series' creator and *Mare of Easttown* mastermind Brad Ingelsby tells ** of the men the Mark Ruffalo-led project brings to light. "Every day, your mailman drives through your neighborhood. He knows your bills and magazines, and the trash men know what you're eating, your Amazon boxes — and that resonated."

Set against the steely stage of Ingelsby's east-Pennsylvania homeland (rife once again with "the craziest dialect" previously heard in *Mare*, quips Ruffalo), *Task*, like its characters, disarms viewers by lulling them into a sense of comfort with its unassuming dressings.

Still, "it delivers," Ruffalo promises of the crescendo of tension viewers experience along the journey. "It's got a great pulse. It's moving, it's exciting. And at the same time, yes, you're going to get your heart torn out."

Sam Keely and Jamie McShane in 'Task'.

Peter Kramer/HBO

The Oscar nominee says it all knowing that his character, Tom, is devoid of inertia as we meet him. Invisible among the bustle of his FBI bureau, Tom once led a quiet life as a man of the cloth. A disturbing family tragedy at the hands of his adopted son tested Tom's faith years prior, prompting an existential adjustment that, now, sends his disparate task force (Thuso Mbedu, Alison Oliver, Fabien Frankel) careening toward Robbie (*Ozark*'s Tom Pelphrey), a garbage collector moonlighting as a gun-toting burglar.

Tom and Robbie are nothing special on the surface, and that's sort of the point. Amid hunting for clues on the case, Tom hunches over his desk, lazily shoveling sausage-and-onion sandwiches into his mouth. He drinks — a lot. He's got a painfully awkward relationship with a grieving teenage daughter. And he's not totally sure what he's searching for in life, other than that troublesome band of masked perpetrators stalking the streets around him.

Robbie struggles with loss, too, as a local biker gang murdered his brother. Dreaming of a better life for his kids and niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones), Robbie's pursuit of justice looks different than Tom's, but the show pits their trajectories parallel to each other on a path to mutually assured destruction and, oddly, revelation.

"We empathize with these people, we relate to them, and it's totally engaging, because it's cops and robbers. It's the chase, danger, and crime," Ruffalo observes. "The wonderful world of a detective on an investigation, slowly unraveling in this collision course of these two characters that we know have to meet one day and wonder what will happen when they finally do."

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Other than deeply probing the dynamics of families that are chosen and others determined by blood, the thread tying both men together also tethers them to one central question: Who are we, if not driven by faith?

The difference in these characters' belief systems — and the answers they find as they move closer toward one another across the show's seven episodes — adds an extra layer of complication that both Ruffalo and Ingelsby felt on a personal level.

Ingelsby hails from a long line of priests, with his uncle leaving his vocation after 30 years, while another two great-uncles served as priests, too.

"When my uncle left the priesthood, I had a lot of questions," Ingelsby remembers. His own exploration of belief systems led to "interesting conversations about how his ideas have changed over the years. [For *Task*] I was interested in a character whose belief system comes crumbling down, and now has to put the pieces back. That's something I deal with every day: What do* I* believe about God?"

Ruffalo also hails from a religious family on both sides. Raised Catholic by a father who was heavily involved in Bahá'í Faith, additionally, the Marvel star's mother was evangelical. At his first communion, he even remembers being "saved" by televangelist Jimmy Swaggart as a birthday gift to his grandma.

Tom's struggle with faith is one Ruffalo can relate to, after being "indoctrinated into these belief systems," he says, "whether I wanted to or not."

Owen Teague, Tom Pelphrey, and Raul Castillo in 'Task'.

Peter Kramer/HBO

He also thinks that, as an actor, he's "mystically drawn to certain parts that can address issues in your own life," and *Task* is one of them.

"You'd have to have a lot of faith right now or be delusional to not question the concept of some benevolent being overseeing mankind's struggles. The way religion is being used today is a huge turn-off. I've struggled with it for a couple of decades now," Ruffalo admits, later elaborating: "There's a lot of human foible attached to it that's commandeered, manipulated, diluted, poisoned, and corrupted it. But, it's hard to tell the forest from the trees, and this show reminds me of the essence of it, which is concepts of empathy, compassion, love, forgiveness, tolerance, and humility."

In the end, Tom and Robbie find rare forms of "grace," Ruffalo feels, but discovering the hows and whys of he and Robbie's arrival to their respective fates is best left to viewing the show built around it.

*Task*, like Ingelsby's *Mare of Easttown* before it, is one that isn't all weighty introspection despite its heavy themes. This is, after all, an HBO crime series. There are chills, twists, thrills, shocking deaths, and wild, lush-yet-levitous standout performance by Martha Plimpton as a surly police chief.

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"A shocking death gives an audience the feeling that anything is possible," Ingelsby says of his signature style, which viewers lapped up amid the winding road Kate Winslet and Jean Smart navigated in *Mare*. "We're programmed to watch a show with expectations, and the idea that any of these characters could be killed off is exciting, because everything is on the table."

In other words, you might think you see the unsuspecting thrills of *Task* coming — until you don't, that is.

*Task* debuts Sept. 7 on HBO.

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