Salli Richardson-Whitfield on Making Emmy History With ‘Task’ and ‘The Gilded Age’

An hour into Salli Richardson-Whitfield’s directorial debut, she was left to sink or swim.This was 2011, and Richardson-Whitefield was standing behind the camera on the set of Syfy’s quirky small-town comedy “Eureka” talking to series creator Matt Hastings. She had been asking to try her hand at directing and finally got the shot in Season 4.

“I remember it was the first day. I was about an hour in, and he just looked at me and he goes, ‘You got it,’ and he left,” she tells Variety. “But by the end of that first episode, I remember going, “Oh, I got this.’ Was my first episode of TV my best work? Probably not, but I understood the assignment and I loved it.”Fifteen years later, she’s still got this, and she’s in the history books to prove it. At last year’s Primetime Emmys, Richardson-Whitfield became the first Black woman ever nominated for directing a drama series. This year, she one-upped herself and became the first woman to have two nominations in that category at the same time. At next month’s ceremony, her name will be called for both the penultimate episode of the gritty freshman crime drama “Task,” and the luminous Season 3 finale of “The Gilded Age” — both HBO series on which she serves as an executive producer.“I actually wish I didn’t have to talk about it because I shouldn’t be the first at this point,” she says of the benchmarks. But for that reason, she feels a responsibility to make sure that every time she’s behind the camera, she’s at her best.“It’s why I go into these places and these spaces, and I work so hard,” she adds. “If I do a bad job, I don’t want any woman, I don’t want any Black woman, to come behind me and be judged by my failure. If you go on a set, maybe 90% of the directors will be men. So if one of them is bad, it doesn’t matter. They’re not judged as a whole group. But if you’ve never had a woman, or you’ve never had a Black woman, work with you before, if I fail, then it becomes [symptomatic of us all]. So, I really take it seriously, and I think this is my purpose and my calling.”She felt that weight on “Task,” which was the new kid on the Sunday-night-primetime-HBO block and a critical hit last fall. But more importantly, it stoked the kind of fire in Richardson-Whitfield that she craves in her directing projects.“Every new kind of genre that I’m able to attack, for me, is a challenge,” she says. “Can I conquer it? Can I be the best at this? The particular episode that’s nominated was that challenge for me.”The episode in question is the turning point of the series. After tragic losses and setbacks, FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) is finally converging on his target: working-class family man Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), who has been robbing trap houses belonging to a biker gang and stripping them of their drug money. Built around an on-foot pursuit in the woods, the episode is a masterclass in tension building and sacrificial storytelling, claiming more than one of the main characters by the end of the hour.In other words, it was a pivotal episode that had to land the gut punch this series wanted to communicate. “I remember [exec vice president and head of drama] Francesca Orsi at HBO saying, ‘This better be the best wooded scene and 20 minutes of a fight scene I’ve ever seen in my life,’” Richardson-Whitfield says with a laugh.Again, challenge accepted. The episode is a directing feat she says was made infinitely more satisfying by “Task” creator Brad Inglesby’s writing across the series. “He just writes these really interesting, flawed people — good and bad,” she says. “And then the opportunity to do such huge sequences of action mixed with great drama, it’s exactly what I want as a director.”But as an executive producer, she’s also been able to help craft everything around the episodes she helms. For instance, all of the Season 1 episodes were directed by two people — either her or Jeremiah Zagar. In Season 2, she will return to direct, this time alongside an all-female directing lineup. Helping fine-tune the vision and the look of the series, even when she isn’t the credited director, has become a key component of what excites Richard-Whitfield.“Sometimes, we’re shooting the whole season at the same time, it’s like making two feature films at once,” she says. “It’s just becoming something that I do now, and I enjoy it and it feels like a comfortable space. Coming in and just doing one episode would feel very odd to me now.”Fortunately, she’s in it for the long haul with both “Task” and “The Gilded Age.” On the latter, she cut her teeth not just as a director with the support of creator Julian Fellowes, but also as a multi-hyphenate creative force on set. She covets working through her vision for a scene with writers and crew, even breaking out massive storyboards to walk through it. She did that with the climax of “The Gilded Age” finale, which weaves together the soapy happenings of two simultaneous high-society balls. She intercut scenes from one with the other, creating a seamless but stylish bridge between two social circles and two racial classes.“I have these beautiful homes, this beautiful wardrobe and these amazing actors, and when I think about that sequence and every entrance into the ball, I wanted to make a meal out of it visually,” she says. “All of it was very planned. What are our connected pieces? What is the camera movement that’s going to lead us in and out of each ball? What is the dress swirl that’ll swirl us into the other ball? I had storyboards. Everyone teases me about my storyboards. But I’m all over the wall when we’re shooting.”It’s her process — one she has refined but also embraced as she’s come to understand that sense of purpose she found in this history-making stage of her career. She trusts her gut, even when not everyone sees the vision right away. During one of the balls, Peggy (Denée Benton) gets her fairy-tale moment when William Kirkland (Jordan Donica) defies his prejudiced mother (Phylicia Rashad) and cuts through the dance floor to propose to her in front of everyone.“At the time, people were like, ‘We don’t know about this slow-motion shot into Peggy’s proposal,’” she says. “I told them to just trust me. It’s Cinderella, it’s romantic, and I know it’s a little mushy, a little over the top, but it’s the thing that people come up and talk to me about the most.”She’s got this. Whether it is the grand ballrooms of the highest societies or the last-resort Hail Marys of small-town families clawing to survive, Richardson-Whitfield has earned her history-making nominations. But there’s always another hill to climb and category to conquer. So, might she tackle comedy next?“Maybe a dark dramedy,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing my sitcom half-hour multicam anytime soon. But if I could get a ‘Hacks,’ then yes! I could do ‘Hacks’ all day.”