← All Of It with Alison Stewart
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- [00:09]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The HBO Sunday night streak continues with the series Task, which is about, one, an FBI operation to find out who is responsible for a string of burglaries outside of Philadelphia. And two, an examination of how to best take care of your family when you are the person who is hurting the most. From the jump, we learn that the robbers are a bunch of garbage men who break into houses looking for cash. But something goes wrong in episode one. People are killed, and a little boy who witnessed it, he's been kidnapped. An FBI task force is put together. It's led by Tom, who has demons of his own. But his boss, played by my next guest, Martha Plimpton, gives him a chance. I think. I don't know. We don't know because the finale of the show airs this Sunday. Martha Plimpton plays FBI lead investigator Kathleen McGinty. A Salon review called her work, quote, excellent. And the show balances grace with grit. Joining us is Martha Plimpton via Zoom. Hey, Martha. Hey.
- [01:15]
B
How are you?
- [01:16]
A
I am doing just great. Here's a question. If you had to describe Kathleen McGinty to someone who never met her, how would you describe her?
- [01:26]
B
Oh, boy. I would say, geez, straightforward. Let's put it that way. She's a woman who's had to work her way through the ranks to reach the position she's in. And like most women who are in positions of authority, after a lot of hard work, she's got very little tolerance for nonsense. Yeah, that's. That's what I would say. I would say she's direct.
- [02:00]
A
How would Kathleen McGinty describe herself?
- [02:03]
B
Oh, gee. Oh, my goodness. I guess she'd say tired. Tired? Yeah. I mean, well, she would call herself dedicated. I'd say she's dedicated to her job, and she loves her job, even though the people she works with give her a hard time. And, you know, I guess you could say, you know, she's. She's seen. She's seen some stuff, you know, but she's dedicated, and she. I think she would think of herself as a good friend, you know?
- [02:40]
A
Yeah. I was going to Ashley, ask that about Kathleen and Tom, who's played by Mark Ruffalo. It's interesting when they meet, he comes to her office and he brings her a bag of tomatoes from his garden. Right. And she's like, yeah, tomatoes. That looks. That's great.
- [02:54]
B
Yeah.
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A
So what do the tomatoes tell us about their relationship?
- [02:59]
B
Well, I think it tells us that, you know, that they're Friends, you know, that they're colleagues, you know, and I think, you know, she sort of. She's probably been to Tom's house for barbecues. You know, they've probably hung out socially in that sense. She knows his family, and so she's aware of this sort of horrible tragedy that has befallen him and his family, and she knows that it's a big reason or it's the reason why he's kind of lost his mojo a little bit, and he's kind of been sidelined by the Bureau. He's working now as sort of a recruitment guy, you know, at college job fairs. He, you know, he sits there at this table, and he, you know, brings out his folder full of brochures and business cards, and he just sits there waiting for students to come up and seem interested in joining the FBI. And, you know, he's. I guess he's kind of lost his way. You know, he's a former priest, and, you know, and this tragedy has sort of ripped his family to shreds. And, you know, he's depressed. And so I think she sees him as needing something, some sort of motivation, something to sort of, in her mind, sort of take his mind off things. You know what I mean? Which is, of course, absurd when you think about the circumstances, but, you know, that's kind of where she's at with.
- [04:23]
A
Tom, and that's why she puts him on the. Puts him on the task force.
- [04:26]
B
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [04:31]
A
Brad Inglesby. He's the writer, the showrunner. Hello? Hi. Are you there? Do you hear me?
- [04:36]
B
Yeah.
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A
Okay, great.
- [04:37]
B
Yeah, I'm here.
- [04:38]
A
Okay. All right, I'll tell people who I'm talking to. It's Martha Plimpton. She's in task. She plays FBI agent Kathleen McGinty. It can be seen on HBO. Brad Inglesby, he's a showrunner. He did Mayor of Easttown. We interviewed him for that. He's a really, really good writer.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What does he do as a writer that is helpful to you as an actor?
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B
Well, I tell you, the thing that I sort of noticed the most about. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah, I hear you. Can you hear me?
- [05:11]
A
Yeah, we hear you. Great.
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B
I'm here.
- [05:13]
A
I see. Okay. There you go.
- [05:15]
B
Yeah. The thing that I noticed. The thing that I noticed most about Brad's writing is that he. He doesn't. He gives you a lot of space. And I. I guess I heard him sort of describe this once in an interview where he said he learned a lot about storytelling from journalists and from a journalist Friend of his who, who talked to him about the most important thing being how you reveal things and when. And so he doesn't write a lot of exposition. There's not a lot of people talking about their feelings or about what they think of things, but it's through their behavior and through their interactions with each other, how they respond to one another, that reveals who they are, you know, And I think that's just really great because it gives the actor so much space, so much room to sort of play within that. And it's incredibly freeing. But it's also incredibly good storytelling, you know, because you don't know exactly where you are in this world all the time. So, you know, just people in life, we can't say, you know, this is where I'm at, this is what I'm feeling, this is what I'm doing. Life doesn't work like that, you know, we're not sitting above ourselves, you know, sort of mapping out our course as we go. We reveal ourselves sometimes by accident, you know what I mean? Sometimes we throw people off, sometimes we create diversions in life with one another. And so I think he's got just a very clear and natural understanding of just how humans talk to one another and how things come out over time. And that makes for really compelling storytelling.
- [07:02]
A
There's a great scene, it's a shoot em up, chase em in the scene. Woods, FBI versus the bad guys versus the kidnapper burglar, guns drawn, shots fired.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Could you tell us a little bit what goes into staging a scene like that?
- [07:18]
B
Well, well, it's incredibly complicated. First of all, from the actor's perspective. You gotta do a lot of weapons training and, you know, tactical training. You know, how exactly do you chase someone in the woods when they could be coming from any and all directions? You know what I mean? You can't see and you're behind a tree and, you know, you're working sort of in full 3D, you know, 360. So that part is really complicated. And so it requires storyboarding, you know, and a lot of planning and, you know, and then you've got a, you know, and a lot of exercise for the actors.
- [07:59]
A
I imagine that. Were you familiar with that kind of stage and that kind of big shoot him up staging?
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B
I hadn't really. I'd never done anything like that before, really. I'd done one, one quick thing in a series years ago, but I'd never done anything quite like that. And so that was exciting. I feel like I want to do more of it.
- [08:18]
A
So your Character. She's in her 50s. She's a boss. What do you think is unique about your character, especially since she is in her 50s and.
- [08:31]
B
Well, I think it's not a. It's not a role you see too many women playing. Sometimes you'll see women in authority, like in the FBI or the CIA, and they, like, have these really fancy suits, and, you know, they dress in, like, Armani, and they have really expensive haircuts, and, you know, they look really good. I think the reality is a little more banal and a little more run down than that. I mean, when you. When you really think about it, an FBI career FBI person does not make a whole lot of money. And, you know, and very often they work in a sort of. Sort of an analog atmosphere, you know, and things are very, very sort of quotidian. They. They probably, you know, they get their suits at Nordstrom Rack. You know what I mean? They've been. They don't, you know, they have one piece of jewelry, usually a watch, or maybe it's an FBI medallion that they wear. But they're not, you know, they're not so sort of slick, you know, And. And that's what I really like about Kathleen and about this character is that, you know, she. She's not slick. She's not calculating.
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A
She eats a lot, though, but she.
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B
Knows what her job is.
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A
Yeah, she does eat a lot. I have noticed that one thing.
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B
Yeah, she. She does eat. Yeah, she's a stress eater, as she says. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [09:54]
A
We're talking to Martha Plimpton. She plays FBI agent Kathleen Mc Task. It's a drama that follows an FBI search for a kidnapper and reveals so much more. All right, as we go into the last episode, and I think I've watched it pretty. I've watched every episode, and I think I've got it pretty clear. In episode four, she makes a call, and it's unclear who she's really talking to. It could just be a small moment. It could be a big moment.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You're not gonna tell me. I understand. Cause we have to watch. But how do you play the part that. Which could be nothing, or it could be really complicated? When you're playing that part, how are we. What are you thinking about?
- [10:37]
B
Well, to be honest with you, I'm not really thinking about much except what I need to do in the scene for Brad to say the line and say it in the way he wants me to say it. And I let him do all that work because, you know, from my perspective, I feel like If I infuse it with too much, you know, knowing, mustache twisting, it's probably not. It's probably not going to be very effective, you know, so I let the camera do that. You know where the camera is and you know, how Brad chooses to, you know, or how the director chooses to light it, you know, and so I sort of let that, you know, I sort of let that go. I try not to put too much weight on it. You know what I mean?
- [11:24]
A
Yeah. The slow has been a slow burn. It's been coming out weekly and people have told each other, you should watch it, you should watch Task. Everybody should. You know, it kind of. At first people weren't. It was like, oh, HBO show. But then it really started to kick in. About episode three, what do you think about the episodes coming out weekly?
- [11:45]
B
I love it. I absolutely love it. I think it's, you know, it brings me back to, you know, when we used to sort of watch serials like Dallas or whatever. You know, that's kind of a. It's a different kind of show. You know what I mean? It's a different kind of thing. But I think the anticipation is really important. And I know that a lot of people are waiting till the final episode is out so they can binge the whole thing because they get frustrated having to wait. But I kind of like that. I kind of like that you gotta hang in there and you gotta wait and you gotta be patient and let things roll out. And I'm a fan of it myself. I mean, I appreciate the binge. I definitely do. But, you know, who's got that kind of time? So to me, to me, that one hour a week, you know, where people get to talk about it, where, you know, you're doing that sort of water cooler thing. If people still gather at water coolers, I don't know that we might have made those obsolete too now, but you know what I mean. When people talk about it and, you know, I get texts and I get messages all the time like, ooh, you're the mole. And, you know, all this kind of great stuff, and people just like exchanging ideas about who they think did what and where they think the story's going. I love that. I think it's awesome.
- [13:04]
A
At the premiere for Task, you looked great.
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B
Thank you.
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A
But you also had this.
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B
Thank you.
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A
This beautiful necklace on that read adhd. And you recently got your. You got your diagnosis. Diagnosis fairly recently. And I'm curious, like, how did being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, how did it change your approach to work wow.
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B
You know, nobody's asked me that. And it's really interesting because, you know, over the years, I always thought of myself as sort of undisciplined and kind of frazzled, and it was very difficult for me to learn lines. What I have to do is I have to write them out in longhand on a yellow pad. And I've always thought that that was some kind of, like, deficiency on my part because I'm not good at learning things by road. I have to physicalize it somehow. And so when I got the diagnosis, everything just kind of fell into place. Like, all these previous things that were challenges for me suddenly made sense. And so it's definitely made me easier on myself when it comes to work. It's made me more relaxed about what my strengths are and where those strengths lie. And it's just made me appreciate the ways in which this diagnosis has sort of given me a kind of. A strange kind of superpower, in a way, because when I am on set, I am extremely focused and extremely present. And now I understand why it is that when I'm not on set, things tend to fall apart. You know what I mean? So it's been really liberating, and really, it's. It's just helped me really come to a. A kinder sort of understanding of myself.
- [15:04]
A
The name of the show is Task. Its finale plays this weekend on hbo. My guest has been Martha Plimpton. Martha, it's really nice to talk to you again.
- [15:15]
B
Thank you so much. It's great to talk to you, Alison. And I'm really excited about this being the Animal Rescue month, because my two dogs are their rescues from Animal Haven in New York, and I love them. They've changed my life and made it so much better.
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A
We love it. What's their names? Shout them out.
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B
Walter and Jimmy Jazz.
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A
Walter and Jimmy Jazz. Have a great weekend.