Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer were the 2023 Logie Awards’ unofficial prom king and queen, winning both the male and female Outstanding Actor categories.
The Colin from Accounts creators and actors have proven to be a match made in heaven on and off screen, after marrying in secret during the pandemic in 2021.
That same year, they celebrated the arrival of their daughter, Joni. But in 2024, their other child, Colin from Accounts, will return for its second season – much to the delight of their legions of fans.
Here, WHO chats to Dyer, 35, and her hubby Brammall, 48, about undiagnosed Stockholm syndrome, their second wedding, and what it’s like working on one of Australian TV’s best series.
Is it ever too much living and working together? Do you ever get tired of each other?
Dyer: Without creating a headline, like of course. You can have too much chocolate cake, can’t you? Like, you can have too much of a wonderful thing…
Brammall: It’s not the first time I’ve been likened to chocolate cake and it won’t be the last.
D: Look, the overall, like, on balance, it’s great, because we respect each other, we have a shorthand. We can explain why something doesn’t work with a look rather than, you might have to sit down a colleague and have a 10-minute phone call that turns into a half-hour phone call. But I’ll tell you what I’m missing, I’m missing him walking through the door and me going, ‘How was your day? What did you do today?’ Because you know what? I know everything. I know when he went to the bathroom, I know what he had for lunch, I know how many coffees he had.
B: And when I go to the bathroom, she insists on knowing if it was ones or twos. But that’s just her.
D: It’s become a Stockholm syndrome situation. We’re sure it’s a balance other couples would struggle with. But you seem to find a real joy in it.
B: [Laughs] It’s definitely out of balance … But the joy of it is real. Like it is a joyful experience. And we actually, even though it’s stressful doing all the stuff and really, having our child as well, it’s like, we’re parents, it’s not just us, there’s another person in our family – that dictates a lot of stuff. But creatively, we don’t have really any disagreements, really.
Never?
B: Ever. It’s just the managing life stuff. It’s the mum and dad getting to work stuff. The very domestic stuff.
D: You know, married couples have worked together a lot. I went to a hair salon last night. A lady cut my hair and her husband runs it. They’ve been working together as hairdressers. In some marriages, in some situations, I think, it’s something that works. Because you can take care of each other.
We imagine work can sometimes feel like home?
B: It does. And it’s baked into the fibre – if you can bake something into a fibre – of this show, is that we’re across every frame of it. Obviously we have an incredible team of people around us and we have directors, we don’t direct it, but we’re there from the start to the finish. So we’re in every frame, so it has a very handcrafted quality to it, so we’ve got no-one to blame but ourselves…
D: … if it doesn’t work.
B: So we insist on doing it that way. We could never throw it over to a team of writers.
Let’s talk about family. What’s it like being parents to a toddler? Do you struggle with anything? What do you most love about it?
D: Dude, look. I never knew how much it would be about my behaviour. I think I was always aware that her behaviour would be the thing I was managing. But it’s actually my own, because if I get tired or impatient or yell or lose my temper or something, it is immediately reflected back to me. Like she does everything that I do. I had a bandage on my foot, she wants a bandage on her foot. I brush my hair, she wants to brush her hair. So if I yell, she yells. And that is what blows my mind about parenting a toddler. It’s a big old mirror and I just want to instil her with grace and kindness that sometimes I don’t have [laughs].
We heard you guys got married a second time late last year. Is that true?
D: We just had a party for friends and family.
B: It wasn’t officiated by anyone with any authority.
D: Yeah, it was just our family were a bit sore that we kind of did it overseas during the pandemic and so it was just to mark it and to have everyone together to break bread, have some speeches and dancing, really.
Now, back to the show, was there a lot of pressure to write the second season because the first one had been so huge?
D: It’s funny, I was just thinking about this, and I think we’re feeling that pressure more right now in the edit … This is the moment where we’re like, “This is the difficult second album.”
(Colin from Accounts returns on Thu., May 30 on Binge. Watch with a 7 day free trial here)
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