Two-time Emmy nominee Tom Pelphrey has revealed he finished as the runner-up for Charles Xavier/Professor X in Jake Schreier's upcoming X-Men reboot for Marvel Studios, joking on THR's Awards Chatter podcast that he's relieved audiences won't have to see him bald: "The only hat I can wear is a fitted size eight. It is empirically a big fat head, and I don't know if we want to see it shaved."
Pelphrey, a New Jersey native, made his current run of acclaim start on Ozark season three in 2020, which led to his first Primetime Emmy nomination the following season. Before that, he broke through on the Cinemax series Banshee, joining in season three as Kurt Bunker and earning a promotion to series regular for the show's fourth and final season. He got sober in late 2013, months before landing the Banshee role, calling the timing of playing a man rebuilding his life a cathartic parallel to his own recovery.
His second Emmy nomination comes for Task, Brad Ingelsby's follow-up to Mare of Easttown, in which Pelphrey plays Robbie Prendergast, a struggling single father raising two young children on a sanitary engineer's salary after his wife left him. Robbie is also grieving the murder of his brother at the hands of the Dark Hearts, a Delaware County motorcycle club, and has taken on responsibility for his brother's 21-year-old daughter, Maeve, played by Emilia Jones, who has been pushed into a maternal role for his kids. With his best friend Cliff, Robbie sets out to rob the Dark Hearts' drug operation to secure a better future for his children and avenge his brother.
Pelphrey said he began reading early Task scripts just as he became a father to a daughter, a coincidence that shaped his performance. "Sometimes, where you are spiritually, and what you're stepping into as a human being, also comes to you in the work. There are times when it's sacred, and something transcendently beautiful happens," he told THR. "The heart of the Robbie character is his love for his children, and I would not have been able to understand that on the level that I did had I not just become a dad."
He also praised Ingelsby for confronting the financial strain facing working-class families: "Something Brad has succeeded in dramatizing is the reality of, How am I supposed to raise these kids without enough money? To make even close to enough money, I'll never be home. How am I supposed to solve that problem? That's the hard question Brad is asking, and it's a question you don't see dramatized a lot because it makes people uncomfortable. It's a real question, and it's a real problem."
Pelphrey noted that Task's second season will become a crossover with Mare of Easttown, since both shows are set in the same Delaware County world. On set, Laura Linney treated him "like she had known me my entire life" from his first day on Ozark, he said, and he attended acting classes and went bowling with the young Task cast members, including Kennedy Moyer, to build rapport.
Before his breakout, Pelphrey spent years working in soap operas from the early 2000s, winning two Daytime Emmys for Guiding Light, alongside indie films, TV guest spots and stage work. He recently wrapped four months of filming in Brooklyn on an Apple action film called Liminal, reuniting with Banshee's stunt team, including supervising stunt coordinator Dave Macomber, stunt coordinator Mike Wilson, and Justin Eaton, who doubled him 13 years earlier.
Photo: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
