After graduating from film school in Los Angeles, writer-creator Brad Ingelsby returned to the Philadelphia suburbs where he grew up and spent the next couple of years in the insurance world, working with his father.
“I really liked working with my dad,” Ingelsby says, breaking into a laugh. “I just wasn’t much of a salesman. I don’t think I had much of a future in that business.” A screenplay he’d written at AFI — which eventually became the 2013 film Out of the Furnace starring Christian Bale and Woody Harrelson — summoned him back to Southern California. He spent the next 13 years in Irvine, writing features including Run All Night, American Woman and Our Friend.
"I really enjoyed it," says Ingelsby, who had a wife — a Philly girl! — and three kids by the time Covid prompted a move back home. In 2021, Mare of Easttown — Ingelsby’s breakout HBO limited series starring Kate Winslet as a troubled detective in Delaware County — earned 16 Emmy nominations, including two for Ingelsby, as a writer and an executive producer, and a win for Winslet. His latest crime-thriller series for HBO, Task, stars Mark Ruffalo as a tortured FBI agent and Tom Pelphrey as a likable small-time criminal. Like Mare, it’s set mostly in Delaware County, where Ingelsby has lots of family. The first of seven episodes debuts September 7.
“I feel like I know these people,” he says. “I know what their houses look like. I know what’s in their refrigerators. I know what’s in their cabinets. I know the streets. When I start from that place of knowing — how they communicate with each other, what they’re dealing with, what their lives look like — it makes me feel confident that I can write these lives with conviction and honesty.”
But Ingelsby doesn’t take the job lightly. “I always feel some responsibility if I’m going to write about this area and this group of people,” he says. “I want it to feel like it has dimension and complexity.”
Brad Ingelsby / Photo courtesy of Landon McMahon
So, how does a good-natured, suburban dad write such dark stories? "It’s exploring my own anxieties or fears in life," Ingelsby says, pointing out that Ruffalo’s FBI agent, a former Catholic priest, has a backstory he knows well.
"My uncle left the priesthood, so I’m always curious and chatting with him about how his view of God has changed and why he left," he says. "Growing up Catholic, I’ve always been very interested in these questions about God and suffering. I think the fun of it is in asking the questions."
This article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, issue # 9, 2025, under the title "The Penn Is Mightier"
Task premieres Sept. 7 on HBO
