In HBO’s Task, Mark Ruffalo’s Tom Brandis assembles a task force of different personalities to investigate a string of household robberies that spirals into a wider web of drama and danger. One of the members of Tom’s team is Aleah, played by Thuso Mbedu.
“I found her to be no-nonsense, on the ball,” Mbedu said, describing what type of energy her character brings to the team. “I imagined her as the one who’s first on the scene, and by the time you ask questions, she has answers. Lizzie feels like she’s got a lot happening around her, and she’s not 100% there, so it feels like Aleah fills those gaps. Aleah comes from the Chester Police Department, which is a very hard environment to be in. She questions people, and when they think that they can run circles around her, she’s able to step up and say, ‘We’re not going to do that.'”
Apart from her own character, Mbedu revealed that she connected deeply with Martha Plimpton’s character Kathleen McGinty, who is Tom’s boss in HBO’s Task. “Character-wise, that’s who Aleah would aspire to be,” Mbedu said. “She would want to be head of the FBI at some point in her career. Even so, Martha played her character with this dry sense of humor that Aleah could connect with. Yeah, she’s kick-ass. You don’t get to be head of the department if you don’t know what you’re doing. And she’s a female, which as we have been shown in movies, or whatever, in the past – not now – those types of positions were generally given to the men. So, it means that Martha’s character would have had to fight to get into that position to prove herself, and Aleah is all about the fights.”
As the leader of the team, Tom comes across as calm under pressure – an archetypal role that seems synonymous with Mark Ruffalo. “Oh my gosh, Mark is such a lovely human being,” Mbedu said. “He’s amazing. Yes, he carries a calmness about him, but he’s funny. He’s absolutely hilarious, and he has this dry sense of humor. He would have moments where he would crack a joke, and then he would look at me, waiting for a response, and then I would snap into the Aleah mode of ‘I’m not gonna react to that.’ Then you would see him shrink and be, ‘Oh, Thuso, why don’t you ever laugh at my jokes?’ Which was funny for me, because I was doing it intentionally.”
Mbedu also revealed that Ruffalo shares a hobby with his character: they’re both birdwatchers. According to Mbedu, they would be in the middle of shooting a scene and Ruffalo would stop to point out and identify a bird to everyone around him.
Unraveling Task, there are several themes to dissect and explore, but what is the overall message of the show? “I can only bring it back toward my character, in terms of the overall message,” Mbedu said, “and it would have me track my character’s journey where she comes into this task force, and she’s not there to make friends, she’s there to solve a crime.
Obviously, the stakes are heightened when it goes from being just a robbery to a kidnapping. And Aleah is quite closed off. She’s had her life experience that has shaped her in a particular way. I’ve always imagined Aleah as a detective who would rather not have partners, and so to even be put in a position where she has to work with people is extremely inconvenient for her, because she can do so much more by herself. But as the show goes on, you get to learn that you can achieve so much more in collaboration with other people.”
HBO is the home of crime dramas, with shows like The Sopranos and The Wire deemed some of the greatest of all time. So, what makes Task stand out? “HBO gives nothing but quality productions,” Mbedu said, “and that is one of the things that Task does so well. It’s a production where you’re taken into the story, where you’re rooting for absolutely everyone. The bad guys aren’t just the bad guys. They are human beings who might be making bad decisions, but they still have the ability and qualities of good human beings. It’s just that they found themselves in the positions that they’re in. I absolutely love that about the story, where you end up rooting for the ‘bad guy’ at the end of it because of how it’s been crafted.”
The miniseries Task, starring Mark Ruffalo, Tom Pelphrey, and Thuso Mbedu, airs on HBO and Showmax.
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