Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall have no Emmy expectations – but it’s nice to be in the conversation
It’s awards season in the US and the team from Colin From Accounts, in their humble fashion, are ‘talking the talk’ and ‘shaking hands with folks’.
Entertainment
Don't miss out on the headlines from Entertainment. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer aren’t really hand shaking types, but their little show that could is in the midst of an Emmys buzz that has them spruiking themselves all over town – because that’s what you do in the US.
It’s a campaign. You have to sell yourself. Rally the crowd, read the room and make them laugh – and luckily for the LA-based married couple, their new season of smash Binge hit Colin From Accounts could be enough to get them over the line.
“We feel very lucky because Paramount+ here in LA and the States, they’ve got behind it and they’ve put a lot of money behind the press campaign – and we have no expectations that we would be in – the Emmys are for shows like Veep, for Julia Louis Dreyfus,” Dyer tells Insider ahead of the new season’s launch on Thursday.
“But it’s nice that we’re in some teeny weeny conversations – but our hearts will not break if the nominations come out and we’re not there, we’re just glad to be getting some more eyes on it over here,” Dyer continues.
Emmy nominations close on Friday – two days after the couple are back in Sydney for the new season’s world premiere in Marrickville – and voting runs from June 13 to 24. Variety currently has Dyer ranked 15th in its predictions for lead actress in a comedy series, among comedy royalty like Jean Smart for Hacks and Maya Rudolph for Loot. It also lists Brammall as 15th in contention for lead actor in a comedy series.
“We’re doing the panels and the things – because over here, no one just taps you on the shoulder and goes ‘hey, here’s an award’ – they campaign for awards,” Brammall laughs, albeit nervously.
“So you meet the people and do the panels …”
“Like the Logies and the AACTA Awards were massive surprises,” continues Dyer (with significant emphasis on the massive).
“But over here, there is a lot more campaigning and politics.
“Not that there aren’t surprises, but it’s a little different here.”
“It’s more of a business,” explains Brammall, 48.
“But that campaigning world enjoy that Patty and I are the show runners – because that’s a very American term – they love that the stars are also the people that made it and that’s a nice package,” Dyer finishes.
“And so we’re just walking the walk and talking the talk a little bit right now. We’re shaking hands with folks.”
It’s not uncommon for the real life couple and creative powerhouses to finish each other’s sentences. If the “realness” and natural hilarity of Colin From Accounts isn’t enough to show you they know each other inside out, having a conversation with them will do just that. Their little Colin, created and written by the pair and lovingly filmed in Sydney’s inner west, is now licensed in more than 100 territories. It’s on BBC2 in the UK and Paramount+ in the US, and they were asked to co-present at last year’s BAFTAs in London.
That’s the beauty of Colin. It’s unordinary things (like flashing your boob at a man who is driving and hits a stray dog that you have to decide to spend thousands to save) happening to ordinary people – who like to sit around and tell funny stories like what would happen if a woman flashed her boob at a man driving past who, yep, you guessed it – hits a stray dog.
And when it comes back for a second season on Thursday – with a bang, quite literally – some firm Aussie favourites like Celeste Barber, Virgina Gay or “Ginny” as they lovingly refer to her, and John Howard – join Brammall and Dyer as the hilarious off-and-on again couple Gordon and Ash try and get their pesky pooch back.
The Logie trifecta-winning husband and wife team say cast interaction in the eight-episode series is so funny they had to rewrite one scene on the spot to remove Dyer from the table as she was laughing too much and messing up every take.
“Harri just couldn’t keep it together,” laughs Brammall, speaking to Insider from their LA home, where they live with two-year-old daughter Joni, who they adopted in 2021.
“Ginny’s character and my character were really at each other and Harri couldn’t handle it, so she had to invent in the scene that she leaves the table to go pay the bill because she kept laughing – we – and when I say we, I mean she – must have ruined like six or seven takes.”
“We try not to make them too perfect,” Dyer says of the show’s characters.
“Sometimes when we get notes on scripts of edits they’ll be like ‘careful, are we protecting the character enough?’ But we don’t need to. They can mess up. That’s the point of the show. They are flawed people.”
“But that – ‘are we protecting the character enough’ happened a couple of times in season two for Gordon because he does some stuff, and it’s not great,” Brammall says in an oh so Gordon-esque way.
“We just hope – we’re banking on the fact …”
“We’re banking on the fact that people love Patrick Brammall,” Dyer laughs.
“That people have connected enough character, he’s likeable, they get him, he’s a bit of a dick,” continues Brammall.
“And then they watched, I don’t know, any of your other shows – and they love Patrick Brammall,” Dyer insists.
The new season isn’t just slapstick humour though. It raises real issues – like when … or how … or if a couple can have children.
“So that was like – at what point were you gonna tell me?” says Dyer.
“Because like – we have a dog and I’m living with you – and through an accident, I’m finding out that you can’t have kids.”
Brammall says they were throwing around ideas when writing season two, and a cliffhanger of sorts will leave viewers wanting more.
“Maybe cliffhanger is too strong a word, but something happens in season two and we were really enjoying the drama of it. It makes us laugh as well – it was kind of a car crash in a way – not literally,” he rushes to add.
“Awkward,” Dyer offers.
“And we were enjoying it – and then Harri was getting a haircut with this lovely lady, who said …” Brammall continues.
“Oh yes, that’s right,” Dyer recalls.
“We were in the middle of finessing it, in the edit, and she was in the middle of cutting my hair and she said – it’s just comfort – Colin is just comfort – it’s my comfort food and I just love it. So we had one day of edit left and the way I had left the editing suite to come to the salon … and where we’d left season two was superrrrrrrr uncomfortable.
“It was just the editorial choices that we’d made.
“And you can ease it up, and we hadn’t – and when she said it was comfort I was like ‘oh my God – we’ve ruined it. We’ve broken it.”
“But we fixed it,” Brammall offers convincingly.
“We still get the baulks and we still get some ‘oh my God’ kind of moments – but we didn’t leave it with like, ‘Oh, that’s a downer.
“We wanted people to leave with like ‘SHIT’.”
“I think we’re just feeling fairly masochistic, because we were a bit tired – we’d done six months full time in Sydney, and writing it for six months before that, and we were so burnt out that I think we were kind of setting fire to it – and going ‘ha’,” Dyer laughs.
“And then we were like oh, wait a second...”
“And this doesn’t just belong to us either,” agrees Brammall.
“It belongs to the people who love it. So it’s still awkward and cringe – but you’re like, it’s all goodddddddddd. We just hope that when people see Colin From Accounts again, they feel happy.”
‘So excited’: Ariana Grande lands in Oz for Wicked premiere
Smiling pop superstar Ariana Grande has greeted fans who waited up to six hours to see her at Sydney airport, as she arrived ahead of the Australian premiere of the Wicked.
Star reveals truth about Savage Garden split
Former Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes has addressed the band’s controversial split, as he unveils his new memoir.