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It’s mid-April, and director Trent O’Donnell is on his lunch break from filming season three of Colin from Accounts at Sydney’s Centennial Park with the show’s stars and creators, Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer.
“What embarrassing Patty stories do we have?” he wonders. There was that time Brammall was called “blandly handsome” by The New York Times (“wildly accurate,” says O’Donnell), or that time Brammall was mistaken for fellow actor Brendan Cowell (“Happens all the time,” says O’Donnell), but his favourite? That time Brammall was mistaken for Dyer’s dad.
“Patty and Harry got off a plane at LAX [Los Angeles] and at the luggage carousel – Patrick went to the bathroom – and someone came up to Harriet and said, ‘Was your dad on [ABC drama] Glitch?’
“And Harriet said, ‘Yeah, he was.’ And they said, ‘I love that show, he’s so good.’ And Harriet said, ‘Thanks, I’ll let him know.’”
Patrick Brammall as Gordon in Colin From Accounts.
O’Donnell, who has worked with Brammall ever since he first directed him in A Moody Christmas in 2012, chuckles away before deciding to say something nice. “I’d be the first one to say terrible things about him, but he’s been pretty good. He’s still just someone who thinks in comedy all the time. He’s a very fun person to be around. He’s exactly how you would imagine him to be 99 per cent of the time.”
Fast-forward three months, and Brammall is sitting at a cafe early one morning in Moore Park. He correctly judges I have yet to eat breakfast, after a hectic morning that also included discovering we had no bread in the house for my daughter’s lunch. “I’m a terrible prepper as well,” he says. “Harry’s like, ‘Write it down.’ She sent me a message as I was walking here this morning, and she said, ‘The hot plate was on, but I still love you anyway.’ And I said, ‘Thank you for not letting the hot plate come between us.’”
He and Dyer are deep in the edit for the third and final season of their hit comedy, as well as juggling the care of their two young daughters, four-year-old Joni and 18-month-old Mabel. (For the record, Brammall, 50, does not look like he could be Dyer’s dad).
“Look, there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “It’s very close to the end. We’ve been in that room for about 10 weeks, and we slowly go insane. We spend all day together in a dark room watching ourselves, which is not as fun as you might think, i.e. not really at all, and you go home together and parent the kids and then sleep next to each other. We are joined at the hip.”
The pair have been married for five years and have been working on Colin From Accounts for roughly the same length of time. That they have decided to call time on the award-winning hit after three seasons is no great surprise – disappointing, sure – but the decision is deeply pragmatic.
Harriet Dyer as Ash and Patrick Brammall as Gordon, with Zak the dog as Colin, in season three of Colin From Accounts.
Patrick Brammall (middle) on set with director Trent O’Donnell (left) and actor Thomas Cocquerel, who plays David.
“We’ve got two kids under five, so we can’t keep doing this,” he says. “Everybody wants us to keep doing more, and we’ll be sad because we love it. We love these characters. We love this world, all the ensemble characters and actors, but everything’s got to end, so let’s end it.”
Much like the first two seasons, season three is note-perfect: funny, awkward, emotional and deeply authentic. There are not many shows that have the audacity to start with a nipple flash and a disabled dog and then have you sobbing by the end of season two over the death of a parent while John Williamson’s True Blue plays in the background.
“We never imagined a season two or season three when we wrote season one,” says Brammall. “We put it all out there, and we finished it the way we did, and it went well, obviously, and so we thought, what do we want to do?
“I guess that’s why we left season two on a cliffhanger. We arrogantly assumed people would want more if we didn’t f--- up season two, and we didn’t. But I think it’s a really satisfying ending. I mean, Harry kept pitching an idea where I get killed – actually, no, didn’t get killed, just died – which was actually a pretty good idea, but it was just a bit too sad.
“We know people’s relationship with this show is generally as a joyful place. And we thought, yeah, we like to pull the rug, but I think that’d be too much of a rug pull if we had Gordon die. So we didn’t do that. But [the end], it’s something we just felt like was a really nice moment thematically as well, tied to that first moment of season one.”
Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, the creators and stars of Colin From Accounts, in season one.
The third and final season picks up in the aftermath of Gordon’s doomed proposal to Ashley. Without giving too much away, things have not gone well for the pair since we last saw them – Gordon on bent knee, Ashley begging him to stand up.
“And then we pick up from where they are, and it becomes clear the fallout from that, and what they had to overcome through that,” he says. “And some of the first few episodes is about going over the detail of exactly what happened and beyond that moment, and what comes next.”
As for Brammall, what comes next is the big question, too. He has been That Guy on TV for 22 years, ever since he picked up his first role in Nine’s dramedy The Alice. Since then, he’s been a jerky older brother (A Moody Christmas), a good cop (Glitch), a comedy cop (No Activity), the love interest (Offspring), a stuck-up husband (Upper Middle Bogan) and an older brother who uses conditioner (Uncle Rad in Bluey).
Kevin Moody (Danny Adcock) talks to Sean (Patrick Brammall), who is wearing an out-of-season crown of thorns for the nativity in A Moody Christmas.
Patrick Brammall as Leo Taylor, Nina Proudman's third leading man on Offspring.Ten
Patrick Brammall (back left) with the cast of Upper Middle Bogan.
He is, in short, a fixture.
“I was thinking about that the other day,” he says. “And I think it was TV Week that did a ‘Patrick Brammall through the years’ on Instagram, and I was like, ‘Thanks for the in memoriam’ … But I never have thought of myself as a fixture. But I am, undoubtedly, undeniably. That blows my mind that people might see me in that way, or people might see me as a celebrity … because I grew up thinking about famous people, and I’m not that. To some people, yeah, but not to everyone.
“I just mainly feel lucky, honestly, like really, truly fortunate. Obviously, I’ve done stuff right, but there’s been dumb luck involved, definitely, because I came up with a lot of people who are very talented, who haven’t been able to string it together in the same way. It’s very hard in this country to do it, and so I’ve definitely had luck.”
There is no doubt that Colin from Accounts has changed both Brammall and Dyer’s lives personally and professionally. Apart from picking up a bunch of Logie and AACTA awards here, they have secured rave reviews in the US and the UK, stole the show while presenting at the BAFTA awards in London, while Dyer won most outstanding performance in a comedy series at New York’s Gotham TV awards in 2024, where the show also won breakthrough comedy series.
They have also both booked follow-up jobs - Dyer starred in the now-cancelled US comedy DMV, while Brammall starred in The Devil Wears Prada 2 earlier this year and will soon be seen in Apple TV’s thriller Last Seen (in which he stars opposite his doppelganger Cowell).
“I was sitting in this emotional kind of river for 100 days,” says Brammall, who filmed the series over 100 days in Melbourne and Victoria’s high country. “I had to leave Harriet with Mabel [in LA] when she was 12 days old, and come back here … it was a crazy time to be doing a full drama about being a father missing his daughter.”
Patrick Brammall in Last Seen, in which he plays a father whose daughter goes missing.
The Devil Wears Prada 2, meanwhile, was an altogether different experience. Brammall was cast as Anne Hathaway’s “unproblematic heartthrob”, a big break in a big movie, but once the film was released, the hecklers piled on. “He’s Australian, he’s tedious, and apparently Anne Hathaway’s dazzlingly chic editor extraordinaire is in love with him?” one report opined. “Peter from the long-awaited new sequel is the film’s most egregious plothole.” Ouch.
Brammall shrugs it off.
“It was a really positive experience, and to be a part of that huge thing, it was amazing,” he says. “And when I saw the final [cut], I was happy with my performance, I just didn’t want to break the movie. And the support, overwhelmingly, particularly in Australia, has been really positive; people go, ‘Yeah, that’s our Paddy’, and I love that. I think the criticism is valid, which is like, why does she need to have a boyfriend?
Brammall and his wife Harriet Dyer at the Sydney premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the State Theatre.Getty Images
“There were cuts made to scenes and some scenes that didn’t make it in at all. And I mean, I’m a showrunner, I understand you’ve got to cut stuff, and you’ve got to service the main characters and the main story. You can’t please everybody. So that’s fine. I totally, totally get it, and that’s as it should be, honestly.”
The pair hopes to move back to Australia to build a creative hub with long-standing friends and colleagues, and Brammall is keen to keep “playing pretendies” as long as someone will have him.
“At first, for me, it was about being in the spotlight, getting attention, showing off is a huge part of it,” he says. “Now, it’s really more about the pretend … but you’re looking for an emotional truth … [and I’m doing that ] as a writer as well. I get to inhabit all these different voices, and I love that. And it pulls on different threads and different strings of levels of empathy and compassion, which is so good.”
Colin from Accounts (season three) premieres on Monday, July 27, on Binge.