Bar-hopping? It’s all part of an intense job

It’s always handy when job-preparation involves bar-hopping.
That was the case for Emilia Jones, as she prepared for “Task” the intense, seven-week mini-series that stars Mark Ruffalo (shown here) and debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday (Sept. 7) on HBO.
Jones (23 and the star of the Oscar-winning “Coda”) is from England, where people seem to have an entirely different approach to words. Now she was playing someone rooted in the blue-collar traditions of small-town Pennsylvania. With dialect coach Susanne Sulby, she was on a mission.
“Two weeks before we started shooting, Susanne and I would go around bars and listen,” she said by Zoom. That soon felt natural. “It’s really fun; it’s not just an accent, it’s like an energy.”
And it’s something writer-producer Brad Ingelsby knows well. “It’s the people I know,” he said. “It’s the people I care about and the way I grew up.”
This is a world he visited for HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” which drew an Emmy for Kate Winslett and 15 more nominations, including for best-miniseries and for is scripts.
All of his stories start with characters, he said, then create a plot to fit. “When I came up with the characters for Tom and Robbie, I (thought): ‘OK, what’s the engine that’s going to join these guys?'”
Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) is a single dad; propelled by grief and rage, he does home invasions. Tom (Mark Ruffalo) is an FBI guy — and an ex-priest.
“When I talked to Mark about his character,” Ingelsby said, “I said, ‘Listen, there’s nothing particularly special about you as an FBI agent. You’re not the first guy through the door; you’re not good with a gun. You’re not going to walk into a room and pick up clues that other people missed.”
Instead, he behaves like an ex-priest might. “He ran a parish. He had people come into his confessional booth. That job is a job of service.”
The role was a natural for Ruffalo, who already has two Emmys (“The Normal Heart,” “I Know This Much is True”) plus four Oscar nominations — while finding time to be The Hulk in Marvel movies.
The rest involved capturing the blue-collar/white-collar feeling — a natural for Ingelsby.
He’s from a small town just west of Philadelphia and, he said, “grew up playing a lot of basketball.” That included at a Catholic high school where his dad (Tom Ingelsby, a former first-round draft pick by the Atlanta Hawks) was the coach and older brother (Martin, a former Notre Dame point guard and current University of Delaware head coach) was a star.
It probably shouldn’t surprise us that one of Inglesby’s movie scripts had Ben Affleck as a basketball coach. He’s written seven other movies, but his two mini-series are a different turf.
Here, he could live with the project throughout, helping mold a world. That included shooting cheerful scenes at a quarry.
“I’ve loved quarries since ‘Breaking Away,'” Ingelsby said. “It’s a movie that was really influential when I was a kid.” (It’s also a movie that captured the blue-collar/white collar mix in the lives of former high school athletes.)
And yes, Pennsylvania has plenty of quarries. “We had two separate locations that were acting as the quarry,” Pelphrey said. “One was more with the vistas and the other was just better for us to jump” into the water.
That day provided a rare respite for Pelphrey and Jones (who plays his niece Maeve), in a story that tangles both in deep emotions.
“Maeve’s very angry at Robbie all the time and she’s resenting him because … she’s in this pattern of cleaning up his mess,” Jones said.
It’s the type of role that might stick with someone afterward — except she didn’t have that luxury. Another role was waiting, with a different attitude and a different accent.
Didn’t anything seep into her post-“Task” life?
“I started swearing more,” she said. “My family was like, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing?’ Like, I’m so British. Maeve was a bit edgy, so that was the only thing that changed for me.”