Task is the latest show to go through a major cast shakeup.
As the show prepares to start production on season 2, Phoebe Fox revealed she wouldn’t be reprising her role as Sara. Season 1 introduced Us to Sara through her dad, Tom (Mark Ruffalo), and adopted sister Emily (Silvia Dionicio).
“I’m not coming back for season 2,” Fox, 39, told TV Insider on Thursday, October 1. “My character lives in a completely different city. So yes, unfortunately not, because I love doing that show.”
Task, which premiered in September 2025, follows Philadelphia-based FBI agent Tom, who is put in charge of a task force to end a string of violent robberies undertaken by an unassuming family man named Robbie (Tom Pelphrey).
Season 1 also focused on Tom’s family as he faced turmoil while deciding whether to show support for his adopted son, Ethan (Andrew Russel), who was incarcerated for the murder of Tom’s wife.
Dionicio, who plays one of Ruffalo’s onscreen daughters, spoke to Us about wrapping up the story.
“Our showrunner is such a collaborative artist and we had a bunch of meetings. He was sending me articles and interviews of other kids who had been adopted [like Emily]. He really wanted to dive into this concept of gratefulness and kids wanting to be perfect. I feel like I grew up with this — even though I wasn’t adopted — and I really anchored myself to that idea,” she explained at the time. “For my own personal way of navigating getting to know Emily, I started recording diaries and I would pretend to be Emily and I was by myself at home. I was living alone and I think it was really informative that feeling of loneliness and of feeling like no one was listening. Just talking into the void for hours as Emily helped me to really pay attention to the nuances of what I thought her relationship to her family was.”
Dionicio was thrilled with the way Emily found her voice as Task went on.
“As the show progresses, she starts becoming a little more confrontational. She starts speaking up for herself a little more. Obviously, it sucks that the consequence of something so sad, but she really is an anchor in the family,” she noted. “At the end, the family does become stronger and I think she’s a big reason as to why.”
Season 2 is slated to feature a crossover from executive producer Brad Ingelsby‘s hit series Mare of Easttown, with Julianne Nicholson reprising her role as Lori. While Fox won’t be part of the new season, she can still be found on HBO in the new series War.
War follows two prestigious law firms in London — Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne — as they face off in a scandalous divorce case between a tech entrepreneur and his movie star wife.
“We have a brilliant lawyer consultant called Catherine who works with lots of high-powered divorce cases,” creator George Kay told Us about the research that went on behind the scenes. “And at the beginning of the process, I was thinking we’re going to want to pilfer every celebrity divorce — like a dastardly maneuver and everything like that.”
The plan ultimately changed. “Then, having written the show, the more you want to do is just write the characters you’ve created,” he concluded. “So that kind of went out the window after a while, and we ended up having to think of our own dastardly things.”
