Patrick Brammall: busy days for No Activity star

It isn’t always silly season for ‘Patty’ Brammall.

‘A performance can take some of the sting out of the stingy subjects,’ according to actor Patrick Brammall. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

Patrick Brammall is an actor who has become ubiquitous in recent years, from the lead role in the Australian film Ruben Guthrie to love interest Leo Taylor in TV’s Offspring. It may come as a surprise, then, that he had an alternative career planned after leaving school in his home town, Canberra. “I went to uni and did arts/law for a few years — I got the arts part in three years, but the more I saw of the law guys, I just thought, ‘I’m not a law guy’,” says the 39-year-old actor, whom everyone simply calls Patty.

It is a strange coincidence, then, that Brammall has frequently played characters at the pointy end of the law in recent years: a country policeman in both ABC’s paranormal drama Glitch last year and The Strange Calls in 2012, and Detective Hendy in the comedy No Activity, returning for a second season on local streaming service Stan from tomorrow.

The series, co-created by Brammall with Trent O’Donnell (New Girl), was nominated for the best comedy Logie last year. And while little happens in a narrative sense (hence the title) it features comedic pairings of criminals, dispatch officers and, of course, cops, played by Darren Gilshenan, Dan Wyllie, Harriet Dyer, Genevieve Morris and David Field. They are joined this season by Rose Byrne, Damon Herriman and Kym Gyngell.

Brammall says there was no special reason for choosing this particular genre: “It really started around the kind of performances we envisaged, it wasn’t like it had to be a cop show, we thought it was just the best way we could f..k around. We just landed on cops, but it could have been anything.”

As such, several possible departures from the first season’s creative choices were contemplated, but eventually abandoned for a traditional kidnap storyline. (Season one’s conceit was a drug bust.)

“We had a brief conversation after the first season about the characters and the premise ... We thought Hendy and Stokes (Gilshenan) could die in a hail of bullets in the opening scene and be on a slab in the morgue, so now it’s a hospital drama — or a bit like American Horror Story, we could do it anthology style (same cast, different characters and narrative each season),” he says.

“We even talked about superheroes for a minute. I reminded Trent the other day, ‘Remember we were thinking about introducing superheroes?’ He said it was never going to happen, and I said ‘But remember we talked about it?’ He said: ‘You talked about it.’ ”

Reprising such a loosely scripted and surprise hit was not without apprehension for Brammall. But speaking to The Australian after three weeks in the editing room, with the first three episodes complete, Brammall feels confident it will deliver the goods.

“It’s like a second album: you don’t want to f..k it up,” he says. “It feels like same bedrock nature of the show, finding the balance between the loosely improvised scenes and the more narrative-based bits. The more whimsical bits that just go anywhere are kind of my preference, whereas Trent is more of a narrative guy — I think we’ve found that balance.

“I’m in love with it all, because it’s so silly. I love silly. But even when you’re not laughing, I think it’s engaging watching the actors think and respond to each other in the moment.”

While “silly” may be a big part of Brammall’s repertoire (he won an AACTA Award in 2013 for his role in A Moody Christmas), it’s not the only part. He has played dramatic roles in film and on TV: he was cast as this newspaper’s proprietor in the Nine Network’s Power Games in 2013. (Brammall’s father, a journalist on The Australian when it launched in Canberra in 1964, helped him research the role.) But it’s the medium of theatre that he feels beckoning.

“I trained in theatre, but the last play I did was Death of a Salesman at Belvoir with Colin Friels, directed by Simon Stone (in 2012),” he says. “Sitting in the editing suite, you see how much TV and film is about sculpting a performance after the fact. They can absolutely make you look a lot better, but it’s nothing like theatre.”

In the meantime, Brammall is travelling back and forth between Australia and Los Angeles, having recently shot a pilot for a US remake of Upper Middle Bogan, title Furst Born, for which CBS has extended its option. (Last year he filmed the pilot for a US remake of Strange Calls for NBC, which hasn’t been picked up.)

“I’ll see how it feels. I would prefer to work here in Australia, but the US is the big leagues, with massive money involved,” Brammall says. “Here, you have two or three places to take a show; over there they are just so hungry for content right now.”

One quintessentially Australian feature of Brammall’s personality is his discomfort with the notion of the actor as artist.

“I’m torn about it. In one sense, obviously the answer is yes, but it’s all semantics,” he says.

“It’s a bit like Dave Field’s character in the last season of No Activity, who abandons his life of crime to open an art cafe (a cafe decorated with art for sale), but of course he totally denies it in that super-Australian way: ‘It’s all bullshit, mate, it’s not an art cafe.’

“Most importantly for me, it’s about joy. A performance can take some of the sting out of the stingy subjects — I believe comedy can be a great healer.”

No Activity season two premieres on streaming service Stan tomorrow.