‘Task’ Star Tom Pelphrey: The One Thing That Kept Me Up at Night

This year’s best supporting actor in a drama series Emmy race includes 58-year-old Billy Crudup, who has won the category twice for The Morning Show , and seven younger men — including three from The Pitt , the year’s most nominated show — who have never won an Emmy; in fact, this is the first nomination for three of them, including the one who many are predicting to win: Tom Pelphrey , who is nominated for HBO ‘s Task .

The 44-year-old has been doing acclaimed work on the stage and screens big and small for more than 20 years, picking up along the way two Daytime Emmys (for the CBS soap Guiding Light ) and Critics Choice and Primetime Emmy nominations (for Netflix’s Ozark , on which he played the bipolar brother of Laura Linney’s Wendy). Related Stories TV Mariska Hargitay Reveals How She Decided to Host the Emmys: "Why Not?" TV Sally Field Recalls the Roles She Fought for the Hardest

But never has he been better received than he was for Task , in which he plays Robbie Prendergrast, a single father and sanitation worker in Delaware County [Delco], Pennsylvania, who is mourning the murder of his brother and robbing the biker gang responsible for the death, putting him in the crosshairs of both that gang and an FBI task force led by Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo, also Emmy-nominated).

They sent me scripts of the first two episodes and asked me to put two scenes on tape. I loved Mare of Easttown , but I’d never met Brad Ingelsby [who created Mare and Task ]. Honestly, it was like Ozark in the sense that as soon as I read it, I knew there was work to be done, but there was just something about the character that I felt like I understood completely and then I wanted it, it just made sense to me. So we put a few scenes on tape real quick and sent them off, and just like Ozark , I heard back a couple of days later, and they were like, “Great, you’re going to do this.”