Hate-watching "The Task": FBI Agent and Burglar face lost loved ones, drugs, and gang war, with a lot of nude dudes and egregious queerbaiting

I want to start the new year by hate-watching Task (2025) on HBO MAX, because:

1. It has one of those dumb one-word titles that don't tell you anything.

2. It's about a "family  man," a trope that suggests that men who have reproduced are not only a thousand times more valuable than those who haven't, they are innately virtuous.   When a "family man" commits a crime, everyone is shocked.

3. The "family man" is Tom Pelphrey, who showed his "big red dog" in A Man in Full.  It had to be a prosthetic, of course, but a red dog is a red dog.

4. The focus character is Mark Ruffalo.  I only knew him from The Normal Heart, where he plays a gay guy, and this photo, with a swishy femme expression and a guy hugging him, made me think that he was gay in real life.  Turns out that's actually a woman, his wife.  Nothing wrong with liking masculine women, but why the swish, unless you're deliberately trying to make people think that you're a gay couple?

Ready for the hate?

Scene 1: Juxtaposed scenes of Mark and Tom's day, not only scene by scene but shot by shot, so sometimes it's hard to tell who is doing what.  Both get up in an empty bed (dead partner!), are alcoholics, and live with a teenage girl, who hates them, plus one or more toddlers.  

The difference: Mark is respectably dressed, while Tom is extremely sleazy-looking.

They head to work:

Hey,  Tom has a picture of a guy hanging from his rear view mirror as he listens to a podcast about "learning to love again."  Dude is gay!

Mark goes to college job fairs to recruit for the FBI.  Do they need to recruit?  Being an FBI agent is the dream job for criminal justice majors; they must get 1,000 applications for every opening.

Tom (left) and his Buddy work as garbage collectors, and on the side they pick up bagsful of loot from a scary-looking guy sitting on the steps at various houses.  They must run a burglary operation.

They stop for lunch, and discuss moving to an island in Canada together (gay couple!), and then internet dating.  Buddy has tried it, but "people" google him, find out about his criminal past, and aren't interested.  People, not ladies. Non-gender specific terms -- dude is gay.

Tom is planning to get into it; he's lonely, and wants a  "life partner"  It's been a year since his wife left; he's ready to "find someone."  More non-gender specific terms, a standard strategy for staying in the closet.  These guys are both gay.  That must be why the wife left.  

Queerbaiting after the break

Austin Lindsay: The casually naked roommate on "Overcompensating" has a BFA and a lot of depressing shorts. With bonus nude fratboys

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Pilot Bunch: Unbreakable boyfriend, zombie boyfriend, teen Jesus manager. With n*de dudes from New Orleans and Hawaii

 

I may have met Pilot Bunch, who played Johnny B., buddy of the teenage Jesus on The Righteous Gemstones, at a Halloween party a few years ago. No, we didn't hook up.

Today he looks a lot like my niece before she began transitioning.  And coincidentally, their boyfriends look very similar, too.

Pilot was born in Kazakhstan, but grew up in Atlanta, where he will graduate from the Woodward Academy in 2025.   His first acting role was in The Lion King, performed at his elementary school.  He got an agent at age 11, and began appearing on tv at age 14.  To date he has twelve on-screen credits  listed on the IMDB, including:

Four episodes of Drama Club (2021), a Nickelodeon mockumentary about a middle school drama club recruitng a football player (Chase Vacnin).  Sounds like "High School Musical."

Pilot plays Colin, the chem-class lab partner of focus character Mack (a girl).  In an interview in TresA, he says that he loved the character: "witty, sarcastic, and always messing with Curtis (Reyn Doi).  Reyn Doi usually plays gay characters, so we can assume that Colin is gay-subtext or gay-vague.

In 2021, Pilot played Vincent, a resident of the Alexandria Safe Zone, in  the post-apocalyptic The Walking Dead.  "A reckless, immature bully," he and his friends play "chicken" with a child zombie (Augustus Morgan, son of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays antagonist Negan).  He says that the role was fun because he got to hang out with Augustus in his zombie makeup. 

He also has roles on The Wonder Years, 115 Grains, The Hill, and Red One, and some theater, including Shenandoah.  He plays Robert, who is kidnapped by Union soldiers during the Civil War (right, with Caleb Baumann as Gabriel)  Robert isn't dead; Gabriel is his best friend, not an angel.

Pilot's biggest role to date is in The Unbreakable Boy (2025), a biographical heartwarmer featuring Austin (Jacob Laval), who has a brittle-bone disorder and is on the autism spectrum.  Pilot starts out a bully, but becomes Austin closest friend and supporter. In a feature article in Pop Size, he notes that the role has special significance for him, because his brother is on the autism spectrum

Pilot's Instagram contains no pictures of him with girls, except for this one, but he could hardly help it: it was at a friend's birthday party.  Otherwise it's boys all the way down.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

Joe Davidson: The gladiator, surfer, soap stud, and gator poacher doesn't mind if you check out his d*ck. With bonus Thomas Jane and Takaya butt

In Spartacus: House of Ashur Episode 1.1, Gladiator Logus (Joe Davidson) insults the dwarf trio Brothers Ferox: "My cock stands larger threats!" They promptly eviscerate him.

During the filming, Joe hooked up with (or buddied up with) the probably gay Mikey Thompson (Musicus).  Plus a brief internet search revealed this photo from the soap Neighbours: Joe's character apparently has a boyfriend.

Plus there are no girls and a lot of guys on his social media posts.  That's enough for more extensive research to determine if Joe is gay in real life, has played gay characters, or both.  Hopefully both.  

Born around 1992 or 1993, Joe grew up on Australia's ritzy Gold Coast, around Brisbane, and began on-screen acting in some teen series:

A diver in an episode of H2O: Just Add Water (2010), about three teenager girls who turn into mermaids (with Luke Mitchell as their human ally).

A swimmer in SLIDE (2011): A Melbourne girl moves to Brisbane and finds the requisite allies, crushes, and enemies, including a gay-ish boyfriend.

A surfer boy in Mako Mermaids (2013), with those three teenage mermaids up to new antics.  A merman (Chai Hanson) is added to the cast.

Joe also meets a mermaid while grieving over his dead father in Glass Tunnel (2013).  

Plus he worked at Warner Brothers Movie World, a theme park in Queensland, playing characters like Edward Scissorhands and Fred from Scooby Doo.

After graduating from the "prestigious three-year program" at Actors Central Australia in Sydney, Joe was cast in his first major role, playing Cassius Grady in the soap opera Neighbours (2017-2018).   He appears as a muscular mystery man at a Guy Fawkes Day party on the same night that the evil Hamish Roche is murdered.  Hamish's son Tyler is the chief suspect.

Left: the OMG Blog thinks that this is a photo of Cassius, but Neighbours never had frontal nudity.

Cassius goes on to save Tyler's girlfriend from a capsized boat, start dating her, rescue a kidnapped baby, get a job as a gardener, and finally admit that he was the one who murdered Hamish (gasp) because he is the evil guy's long-estranged son (double gasp). 

Um...Cassius was straight, buddy. 

Maybe there are some gay roles in his later work?

Stranded (2018): A British soldier is stranded with a lady.  They smooch in the water. 

Abandoned (2018).  What do you think?

Sons of Summer (2023):  A surfer brings his buds on a trip to the Gold Coast town where his dad was murdered, and runs afoul of murderous drug dealers.  He's got a girlfriend.

Anyone But You (2023); Ben (Glen Powell) and Bea don't like each other, but Bea's sister is marrying Ben's friend Pete's sister, and for some reason they have to pretend to be a couple at the wedding.  Joe plays the current boyfriend of Ben's ex girlfriend, who dumps him for Bea's ex-boyfriend. It's based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, so you've got to expect some partner switching. 

In this scene, Joe shows his butt to demonstrate that he's much hotter than Ben.

He shows his dick, too (after the break).