Patrick Brammall is “blandly handsome and on the comfy side of fit”, or so said The New York Times in a 2018 article about the Australian actor. “I didn’t have a publicist back then or anything, so I thought, you know, this is amazing! Then I read that bit, and I’m like, ‘Mate, you didn’t need to write this. What are you doing?’” he laughs. It’s now eight years later, and Brammall is fresh off his role playing Anne Hathaway’s love interest in The Devil Wears Prada 2. Suffice it to say, there are no hard feelings.
In fact, “blandly handsome” was his Twitter bio for years. At 50, Brammall is used to mining his life for laughs. He knows everything, even the most cutting backhanded compliment, makes for great material. It’s why he brings that quote up today, and it’s certainly one of many reasons why his breakout hit Colin from Accounts – a charming, ribald comedy inspired, in part, by his relationship with his wife, co-star and co-creator Harriet Dyer – is so brilliant. “If Harry and I find something funny, it doesn’t matter how embarrassing it is for us; it’s going in the show,” says Brammall, recalling an early scene in which he falls out of a bathtub fully nude after accidentally sending a dick pic. “It’s humiliating. But we have to do it.”
Due to air its third and final season in the UK this month, Colin began back in 2022 with a flash, literally. Gordon (Brammall) is driving through Sydney when he locks eyes with Ashley (Dyer) who, crossing the street, flashes him a smile and a breast. Gordon is so distracted by the sexy surprise that he hits a dog – a calamity that brings these two strangers together in hilarious and oddly affecting ways. That Gordon is 12 years older than Ashley is a comic gift on telly and in real life, such as when a fan mistook Brammall for Dyer’s dad.
His latest project sees him pulling from his life in less joyful ways. Out next week on Apple TV, Last Seen casts Brammall in a very different light. He plays Ian Ridley, a grizzled ex-police officer struggling to cope after the abduction of his three-year-old daughter, 11 years earlier. When Ian, now working as an emergency phone operator, receives a call from a girl he believes to be his missing child, he sets out on a mission to uncover the truth.
No doubt, Brammall says, being a father fed into his performance. He and Dyer have two adopted daughters, Joni and Mabel. “My eldest was three at the time we were filming, and I think that gave me a bit of a shortcut into the character that I wouldn’t have access to if I wasn’t a dad,” he says. It also helped in a roundabout way that Brammall left home to start shooting the series just 12 days after the birth of their second child. “Crazy,” he grimaces. “I was fully abandoning my family to go and film this.” Dyer and the kids followed to Melbourne, where Last Seen was being shot, as soon as Mabel’s passport came through so they could be together as a family. “But still, it’s not what you imagine you should be doing as a father, so I let the feelings of being an absent dad help inform my choices as Ian, for sure.”
Brammall is completely convincing as a gruff, unshaven alcoholic. All repressed emotion and violent desperation, Ian is very much not Gordon. But Last Seen is not as much of a switch-up as it initially seems; Brammall is a classically trained actor who made his name back home with Glitch, a paranormal two-season tale that won Australia’s top drama-series awards. Taking on a dramatic role like this wasn’t as daunting a prospect then as leading an Apple TV show in general. “A lot of people are going to see it so I didn’t want it to suck,” he says simply, considering this for a moment before adding, “but that’s every job really.”
Perhaps nowhere more than his last gig playing the boyfriend of Andy Sachs in one of the year’s, if not the decade’s, most anticipated sequels: The Devil Wears Prada 2. As the lovely Peter, an Australian real-estate contractor living in New York City, Brammall is an antidote to Nate’s (Adrian Grenier) whiny dismissiveness in the 2006 original. He’s a nice guy. Too nice, some fans thought. “The most criminally tedious heterosexual male to ever appear in a mainstream movie,” read a piece published in this newspaper (sorry, Patrick), amid several others like it. Brammall is understanding of the criticism. “People are so connected to the character of Andy, and she’s been present with them for decades, so I think they have very strong feelings about what she should and shouldn’t do,” he says.
The role was also trimmed down some because, well, that’s showbiz baby. A consummate professional, Brammall is understanding of this too. “You’ve got so many characters to service, and you’ve got such a huge audience to service,” he says. “In the end, I understand the function of that character. He was a supportive guy. He was there. There was a bit of a skirmish between them […] but not really, and then it’s a nice soft place to land at the end. I totally get it, and I didn’t take it personally.” The movie’s director, David Frankel, got in touch to let him know his scenes had been condensed before the premiere – something that Brammall makes sure to do himself when he’s the one wielding the scissors as a showrunner on Colin.
Regardless of any criticism, Peter was a plum role, a part so coveted in Hollywood that Brammall didn’t think he stood a chance – which is why he flat-out declined the invitation to audition. He was still shooting Last Seen at the time, and the family was getting ready to relocate to Montreal, where Dyer was due to start filming a workplace comedy for US television, called DMV. “So even if I got the role, I would have had to do it while I was meant to be being dad. It was inconvenient for everyone, and so I said, thank you, but no,” he says. “Also, underneath all of that, I thought, I’m not going to get it anyway, so it’s a waste of time. One week later, I got a text from the director offering it to me. No audition.”
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A little coyness goes a long way, I suggest. “It wasn’t a move on my part, but it turned out pretty well for me,” he says. “Once they offered it, I couldn’t say no, and so we had to adjust as a family. Harry was like, ‘Oh, what a nightmare! But yes, of course, you have to do that.’” He repaid the favour at the film’s star-studded premiere where he accidentally agreed with an interviewer who called Hathaway the most beautiful woman in the world. Watching from home, Dyer shared a very funny video capturing her reaction to marital betrayal caught on live television. “I’d like to take this opportunity to rescind my comment,” laughs Brammall. “Anne is very lovely, but no one’s more beautiful than Harriet Dyer… I’m never going to get over that! But hey, I was on a red carpet talking to a man in a purple trench coat. The red carpet’s a crazy place.”
With a mega blockbuster under his belt and now an Apple TV show, Brammall seems to be on his way to making good on an early comparison that The New York Times (yes, in that same article) made to American superstars Chris Pratt and Ryan Reynolds. “I don’t think I’m living in the same size houses as those guys!” says Brammall, laughing. “Fortunately, I am not in the business of making comparisons of myself to anyone, so I do not have an opinion about that.”
When you’ve got two parents whose careers are on the rise, something’s gotta give, and with their second daughter now aged one, the idea of doing another season of Colin felt impossible to Brammall and Dyer both. “We’ve been making the show for as long as our eldest daughter has been alive and so she’s always had to share us with the show, and now we’ve got the younger one… there’s just too much to do,” he says. “And it requires Harry and I both, and so that’s not ideal.” As such, this third outing will be Colin’s last.
It was as much a creative decision as it was a practical one, notes Brammall. “The story we’ve been telling is about two people who meet in this chaotic way and whether they choose to embrace that chaos or not, which is what we find out at the end of the third season,” he says. “If we kept going, of course it’d be fun, but it would be a different show. It’s not a show we’d ever make.”
Would he and Dyer ever be tempted to cash in and let someone, in the UK or America perhaps, do a remake? “Who knows? If they backed up a garbage truck full of money, we might have a conversation,” says Brammall. “But we’d like to leave it there. It feels special. My favourite comedies did that, and it does feel like there’s an integrity to it that I really respond to.”
The end of Colin will be a loss to the TV landscape. The singular series flourished into something emotionally resonant, sometimes even devastating, while also remaining fun and silly – the kind of show that names a veterinarian character Yvette. In that way, it is sort of like Brammall, a seasoned actor who knows that a grown man falling out of a bathtub naked will always be funny.
The first two episodes of ‘Last Seen’ are out on Apple TV on 9 September, with new episodes weekly