A three-time Emmy winner (and 10-time nominee), Avy Kaufman has also been recognized by her peers with 52 Artios nominations and nine wins, over a career spanning more than three decades, and nearly 400 films and TV shows.
The odds of her earning another Emmy nod this year are pretty high, judging from her work on HBO’s Task. Created by Mare of Easttown’s Brad Ingelsby and starring Mark Ruffalo, Tom Pelphrey and Emilia Jones, the show follows an FBI agent heading up a task force to put an end to a string of violent robberies led by an unsuspected family man.
Kaufman talked to us from her New York office.
Key Insights
- Casting decisions are driven less by credits and more by whether an actor feels authentic and fully “molds” into the role.
- Kaufman emphasizes trust on both sides, believing actors know when to take risks, pass on roles, or step outside their type.
- Access, persistence, and communication matter, as seen in her relentless push to get Tom Pelphrey to read for Task.
Let’s start with [your decision to cast] Tom Pelphrey as Robbie.
I was relentless. That’s the tricky thing about casting. I speak for myself only, but you read something and you get a feeling for it. It was important for me to have different voices tell this story, and Pelphrey was not a new name in the world, but I was relentless. I just felt like he could go toe to toe with Ruffalo.
What was it that made you so relentless about him?
At first he wasn’t going to read, but they said he had to, so I begged his team. And he did. It was that simple.
Do you find there are more actors now who won’t read? Or are reluctant to?
I don’t think it’s an attitude, per se, for everybody. I feel that when some people feel like they’ve done it before. I feel that way sometimes if I’m asked to take a meeting and I’ve done it. It’s a tricky thing. I never say this, and I’m going to say this is now, you need an agent or a manager or whomever it is that’s taking care of the talent to have a good conversation.
I was able to speak clearly with his team just to say why it’s important for this reason.
There are at least three major actors, Alison Oliver, Sam Keeley and Phoebe Fox, who are either English or Irish, and I’m curious about how you found them and brought them in for this very American story.
I had seen Alison in two British shows, and at first I was like, “Wait, is that the same person?” Because she’s a chameleon. She read on a Zoom and everyone loved her. Same thing with Phoebe. Sam as well. If I’m lucky enough to get visas, I love to look at talent from all over the world.
If they can have the proper accent and we can get a visa, that’s just fun for me personally. People don’t want me to do that most of the time, but it makes my job a lot of fun and curious and imaginative.
Is that one of the things that you would recommend to any foreign-born actor? To get their American accent down?
I’m going to recommend doing whatever you feel comfortable with. I just feel like that’s the one beautiful thing in seeing actors, is we can all feel when they’re comfortable. They just mold into the role.
Emilia Jones plays something I hadn’t seen her do before, which is always good to see from an actor.
You never want to say this out loud, but there were choices, and the team really loved Emilia. When I saw what she did, I was so deeply proud of her. I mean, the relationship between her and Tom was so interesting and strong.
You never know what it’s going to be like, y’know? You read something and then they go off and shoot it for nine months, and then we get to see it two years later. Sometimes I’ll look at shows I’ve worked on and I’m going, “God, I don’t remember that character … ” (Laughs)
Should actors be trying as many new things as possible?
It’s interesting, because I’m here to talk about one show, but there’s a show I worked on last year, where an actor in the movie passes on a role. I used to get upset, and I’m sure I still do because I take everything too personally, but if an actor passed on a role, I didn’t even want to share it with the director. I didn’t want to feel it.
It’s taken me many years, but I feel that I have to trust if an actor passes on a role or accepts a role they’ve never done, it’s what they need to do. I have to trust that they know. We don’t know. It’s so hard to be an actor!
It goes hand in hand with what you said before, about an actor needing to do whatever makes them comfortable.
I don’t know how other people work. We just love actors because that’s what we do.
Two of the things that stood out for me were the motorcycle gang (the Dark Hearts) and the kids. Let’s start with the Dark Hearts.
It’s interesting because I had done a show with Wagner Moura and Brian Tyree Henry [in Dope Thief] right before I did Task, and we were looking for similar characters [for the] motorcycle gangs. Bad boys. Dark characters. So it was just a deep search because I couldn’t use the people I had just used. Just auditioning a thousand people.
And the kids? Especially Ben Lewis Doherty as Sam.
And the kids! I’ve [cast] a lot of kids in my time, and I love casting kids. You’ve got to cast close to the bone. You have to understand who this kid is. And even for Sam, I like to talk to the kids for a long time to get to know them to see if they are actually ready to do something like this.
These are tough roles for a kid. Sam, especially because, to be kidnapped? But kids … it’s about love. I think, hopefully, [with] human beings, animals, we follow the love. Hopefully, we follow the love and keep trust in there because he had to have some trust as well.
I think that applies to acting in general.
And life. You have to trust, you have to love, you have to do all of it, and it’s all part of the same thing.
