Sam Keeley has kept his head down during most of the run of “Task,” the hit HBO series in which he stars, as he’s been busy at work on another project. But the success of the show has followed him.
“I’m on set most of the time, so I get up very early and I work all day and then I eat and go back to sleep, rinse and repeat, and it’s been like that since the show came out. But I’m feeling that love off people,” he says, over a Zoom call from his home in Reykjavik. “Some people have even approached me in the hotel I was staying at recently who had watched it. For an actor, you can’t ask for anything more. It’s a dream job with a dream reception, so it’s been incredible.”
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The series was created and written by “Mare of Easttown” creator Brad Ingelsby and follows Mark Ruffalo as an FBI agent outside Philadelphia who is in charge of a task force investigating a series of robberies tied to a local motorcycle gang. Keeley plays Jayson, the leader of the gang, the show’s most obvious villain. He’d originally read for another role and didn’t get the part, which devastated him.
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“I was in the grieving process of letting go of a project that you really love,” he says, “and then I was with my mother out having a drink in Dublin, and my phone rang with all of my team on, which is either really good news or really bad news.”
The news was of the very good variety: There was a straight offer for the role of Jayson in “Task,” who he immediately recalled from the earlier scripts.
“It was hard to forget that this very heavily muscled, heavily tattooed leader of this motorcycle gang who was responsible for so much pain and anguish in pretty much all of the characters’ lives,” he says. “On the call when my representation told me, it was very emotional because it’s not very often a job like this comes along. But in my rereading of the script, I got even more excited because I hadn’t read past [episode] three at that point, so I didn’t know where it was going to go and what type of antics he was going to get up to. So it just got better for me as I got more and more involved.”
Keeley, who is Irish, had three months to develop the Philly accent and understand the biker culture Jayson is part of before arriving in Philadelphia, with another month or so to embody Jayson in the city he’s from.
“I was excited and enticed by the challenge of trying to create a conflict with the viewers. I mean, there was no way people weren’t going to hate him on the show,” Keeley says. “He’s got all those elements, but I wanted to sprinkle a sense of humanity in there as well, and a bit of reasoning and rationale as to why he behaves the way he behaves and what he does, the things he does. That was an exciting thing for me that I was kind of conscious and kind of tracking the whole way as we were shooting.”
Growing up in Tullamore, Ireland, which Keeley describes as a “very humble working class community,” he never imagined himself becoming an actor. It was only when he had failed math and was at risk of not graduating high school that a teacher suggested he try a drama degree. For his audition he learned a monologue from the Brian Friel play “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” and “somehow, miraculously I got in.”
“Once I got in, I was obsessed. I just was like, ‘OK, this is what I’m supposed to be doing,’” he says. “I could feel that I was good at it, and I knew that I just took to it.”
He ended up booking a job six months later, signed with an agent and never looked back.
“[Acting] just was not on my radar and there were no actors in my family or anything like that. When I told them I was going to pursue acting, it was like, ‘OK,’” he says. “I think slowly then they came around to the idea once I started to appear on the television set. Once my granny and granddad could start collecting newspaper clippings, I think that was the proof in the pudding.”