HBO has expanded the second season of Task with Harry Melling, Adam Nagaitis and Aminah Nieves joining Mark Ruffalo as the crime drama reshapes its investigative team around another high-risk federal operation.Ruffalo is set to return as Tom Brandis, the former priest turned FBI agent whose first assignment placed him at the centre of a violent investigation in the Philadelphia area. The new season will again follow Brandis as he leads a task force, but the operation is being repositioned with fresh personnel and a wider law-enforcement conflict involving FBI and DEA figures.
Melling, best known globally for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films and later acclaimed for roles in The Queen’s Gambit and The Pale Blue Eye, will play Brennan Boylan, described as a volatile DEA agent. Nagaitis, whose credits include Chernobyl, The Terror and The Gold, joins as Luke Clemmons, a steady and loyal DEA agent. Nieves, who broke out as Teonna Rainwater in 1923, the Yellowstone prequel, has been cast as Nataly Zamora, an FBI agent and young mother with deep ties to the community she is trying to protect.
Their arrival follows the addition of Mahershala Ali to the second season, giving the HBO drama a heavyweight ensemble built around competing federal teams and overlapping jurisdictions. Ali is expected to play a seasoned DEA figure whose work brings him into Brandis’s orbit, setting up a tense dynamic as the investigation grows more difficult to read.
Created by Brad Ingelsby, Task began as a gritty Pennsylvania crime drama following Brandis as he led a team probing violent robberies connected to drug-house targets and outlaw motorcycle gangs. The first season paired Ruffalo with Tom Pelphrey, whose Robbie Prendergrast became the emotional counterweight to Brandis’s investigation. Its seven-episode run drew strong reviews for its bleak tone, layered character writing and grounded treatment of police work, faith, grief and economic pressure.
HBO renewed the series in November 2025 after positioning it as one of its strongest drama launches of the year. The renewal also shifted Task from a contained crime story into an anthology-style continuing vehicle for Brandis, allowing the series to retain Ruffalo’s character while bringing in a new case and a largely refreshed field team.
Season two’s casting points to a broader institutional drama. The inclusion of DEA agents suggests the new story will move beyond a single FBI-led probe into an investigation shaped by narcotics enforcement, inter-agency mistrust and the personal stakes carried by agents embedded in affected communities. Nieves’s role as Nataly Zamora is especially significant because it places a younger FBI agent with family responsibilities inside the moral and operational pressures that defined the first season.
Ingelsby’s work has often drawn strength from local specificity. Mare of Easttown used a tight Pennsylvania setting to examine class, policing and family trauma, while Task extended that approach into a darker crime framework. The second season appears likely to preserve that regional grounding while expanding the scale of the investigation through federal drug enforcement and a new roster of agents.
Ruffalo’s return gives HBO continuity at the centre of the series. Brandis ended the first season as a man still carrying deep personal loss, professional doubt and a complicated sense of duty. Rather than replacing the emotional architecture of the show, the new cast appears designed to test it from different directions: Melling’s Boylan through volatility, Nagaitis’s Clemmons through discipline, Nieves’s Zamora through community loyalty and Ali’s DEA veteran through authority and rivalry.
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