Patrick Brammall, the actor who wrote his own infertility into a romcom critics couldn’t fault

Patrick Brammall

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 30, 1976 Canberra, Australia
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Overlord, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Little Death
Awards	3 AACTA · Satellite Award

For most of his working life Patrick Brammall has been one of the funniest people in rooms the rest of the world never walked into. Australian viewers know him as a member of a spectacularly unhappy family at Christmas, as a midwife who could not stop talking, as the country police sergeant whose dead neighbours climb out of their graves. Audiences elsewhere met him later and in fragments: the husband who is always away climbing in an American horror series, the pleasant man Anne Hathaway goes home to between fashion crises. This month the fragments have finally rearranged themselves into a single picture. He is carrying a six-part Apple TV thriller as a father hollowed out by grief, and he has just closed the romantic comedy that turned the most private fact of his life into its plot. Both jobs ask the same thing of him, and it is what he has been doing all along: taking a situation that ought to be unbearable and working out, precisely, what a person does next.

The unbearable situation came first, and it came at birth. Brammall arrived in Canberra with prune belly syndrome, a rare congenital disorder that affects the abdominal muscles and the urinary tract. His doctors, he told The Sydney Morning Herald years later, did not expect him to live much beyond a few months. He went through several operations and spent a large part of his first decade in and out of hospital. He grew up on the south side of the city, went to St Thomas the Apostle primary school in Kambah and then to Marist College Canberra. The illness also left him infertile, a fact he would eventually stop treating as private and start treating as material.

By the time he graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2001, the boy born in Canberra on March 30, 1976, had settled on acting. The first real break came three years later with The Alice, a telemovie set in Alice Springs that did well enough to become a weekly series in 2005. The series did not last, but it gave him steady screen time as Matt Marione, and it was on that set that he met his first wife, Samantha Nield, who was working on the crew. They married in 2013 and had divorced by 2017. What followed was the ordinary apprenticeship of an Australian screen actor: a recurring part on Home and Away, a lead in the 2008 drama Canal Road, single episodes of All Saints, Rush and East West 101, and theatre in between.

Two jobs from that stretch show the range he was quietly assembling. In the 2010 television film Hawke he played the Labor politician Kim Beazley, and in the 2013 miniseries Power Games: The Packer–Murdoch Story he played Rupert Murdoch. Playing living power brokers is mostly a test of restraint, and he passed it without making much noise. In cinema he was Tim, the brother of Ryan Kwanten’s would-be superhero, in Griff the Invisible. He was, in other words, far better known to casting directors than to viewers.

Comedy is where viewers found him. In 2012 he played Sean Moody in A Moody Christmas, Trent O’Donnell and Phil Lloyd’s ABC series about one family’s disastrous Christmas Days across six years, and won the AACTA Award for Best Performance in a Television Comedy. He came back for the sequel, The Moodys, and wrote one of its episodes, which brought him an Australian Writers’ Guild nomination. The same run took in the supernatural comedy The Strange Calls, in which he played a small-town police sergeant, the sketch show The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting and Upper Middle Bogan, where he was Danny Bright. In 2014 he joined Network Ten’s Offspring as Leo Taylor, a midwife, and stayed with the series until 2016.

The most useful of those comedies turned out to be the smallest. No Activity, a stakeout comedy about two detectives killing time in a car, was the very first original commission of the streaming service Stan in 2015, and his performance as Hendy brought him a second AACTA comedy award. The format travelled. When CBS All Access made an American version in 2017, Brammall developed it with the show’s creator, Trent O’Donnell, and took the passenger seat as Detective Nick Cullen opposite Tim Meadows, with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay among the executive producers. It ran for four seasons, the last of them animated. For an Australian actor that was a new kind of foothold: a job in the American industry that he had helped to build rather than one he had auditioned his way into. Guest spots on New Girl and Life in Pieces followed, and in 2021 a regular role in the ABC network sitcom Call Your Mother, as a therapist renting a room to Kyra Sedgwick’s meddling mother. It was cancelled after one season. Younger viewers, meanwhile, know his voice without knowing his face: he plays Uncle Radley, Bandit’s brother, in Bluey.

The drama ran alongside. In Glitch, the ABC’s supernatural series about the dead returning, in perfect health and without memories, to a Victorian country town, he spent three seasons as Sergeant James Hayes, the local policeman who finds his late wife among them. The first season won the AACTA Award for best drama series, and Netflix carried the show to viewers around the world. From 2019 he also played Andy Bouchard, the husband of Katja Herbers’s forensic psychologist, in Robert and Michelle King’s Evil, a professional climbing guide who is usually somewhere else. The recurring role kept him in American living rooms until the series ended in 2024. His film work stayed steady and secondary: Josh Lawson’s ensemble comedy The Little Death, the Hollywood comedy Fun Mom Dinner, the war horror Overlord.

The screen role that most clearly pointed toward what he is doing now was Ruben Guthrie, Brendan Cowell’s 2015 film of his own stage play. Brammall played the title character, a hard-partying advertising executive whose fiancée leaves him after a drunken accident and who promises to go a year without drinking to win her back. It asked him to play addiction from the inside, without a punchline to hide behind. A decade later, Cowell is the man across the table from him in Last Seen.

Then came the project that reorganised everything. Colin from Accounts, which he created, wrote and stars in with his wife, the actor Harriet Dyer, premiered on the Australian streaming service Binge in December 2022. Its premise is a car accident: Dyer’s Ashley, a medical student, flashes a passing driver, the driver hits a dog, and Brammall’s Gordon, a bar owner and craft brewer, ends up sharing custody of the injured animal with the woman who distracted him. What the show did with that setup was unusually precise. Its interest in bodies, scars and the question of whether its couple could or should have children was not invented from nothing. Brammall is infertile as a result of his childhood illness, and he and Dyer have said that experience fed directly into the writing. Both of the first two seasons earned a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, the first won the AACTA Award for best narrative comedy series, and Paramount+ took the show to American viewers from November 2023. At the Satellite Awards honouring the television of 2024 he won best actor in a comedy or musical series, ahead of Adam Brody, Nathan Fielder and Seth Rogen, and in 2025 he was nominated for a Silver Logie.

The international exposure of the past year has come with a more awkward reception. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, released in May and one of the biggest hits of 2026, with close to 700 million dollars at the worldwide box office, he plays Peter, the renovator and property investor Andy Sachs meets while viewing apartments in a building he has just done up. For some viewers he was a relief after the much-debated boyfriend of the first film. Others were blunter. Slate ran a piece whose headline declared that, among the film’s beautiful people, one “sticks out”, and Cosmopolitan called Peter “one-dimensional”. Dyer answered on Instagram that “the edit is brutal” and that the scenes behind the promotional photographs had been cut, and Brammall has confirmed that his part was trimmed and described the shoot, shot under constant paparazzi attention, as surreal. The complaint misreads what the role is. Peter is a structural device, the sensible man who lets the film keep its eyes on Miranda and Andy, and it is the kind of part that buys an actor a year of riskier work. Read against his own projects, it looks less like a turn in his career than a well-timed introduction: the largest audience he has ever had arrived a few months before the two series that actually carry his name.

Last Seen, which premiered on Apple TV on September 9, is the first of them to put his full dramatic weight at the centre of the frame. Adapted by Kris Mrksa from Ryan David Jahn’s novel The Dispatcher and directed by Christian Schwochow, the six-part series moves the book from the American Midwest to the Victorian coast. Brammall plays Ian Ridley, a former police officer turned emergency dispatcher who drinks to survive the disappearance of his three-year-old daughter eleven years earlier, until a call on the line convinces him she may still be alive. Brendan Cowell plays Henry Reid, a reclusive fundamentalist, with Maxine Peake as his wife. It is the first Apple TV series both made and filmed entirely in Australia, shot in regional Victoria in early 2025. Brammall has admitted the casting unsettled him. “When I was cast, I was like, fantastic, amazing, what a role,” he told ABC News. “But 5 per cent of me was going, ‘I think they made a mistake’.” The doubt, he argued, is necessary, because “you’re required to put it all on the line every time you embody a character”.

The reviews have largely vindicated the gamble. Luke Buckmaster gave the series five stars in The Guardian and called it “riveting television”, Rotten Tomatoes counts 86 per cent of critics in favour, and its critics’ consensus credits his performance with taking the series “to the next level”. The more sceptical notices, The Hollywood Reporter’s among them, took issue with plot contrivances rather than with the man at the centre. He told The A.V. Club that he had never done anything like it, “or of this scale”.

The ending of Colin from Accounts overlapped with all of this. The third and final season began on Binge in Australia on July 27 and reached Paramount+ in the United States on September 10, the day after Last Seen launched. He and Dyer wrote it while he was shooting the Apple series, and he has framed the decision to stop as a matter of finishing the story properly. The show had always asked whether Gordon and Ashley would accept the chaos that brought them together, and “we wanted to answer it in a really satisfying and interesting way, and also to respect our audience”.

The personal story runs underneath the work without ever being fully separable from it. Brammall and Dyer were first reported as a couple in 2017 and married in March 2021, five days after getting engaged. They adopted their first daughter in September 2021 and a second in February 2025. That same year he took part in the Australian edition of Who Do You Think You Are? on SBS, which confirmed a long-buried Asian ancestor on his mother’s side, a family rumour his mother and uncle had half-known since they were teased at school for looking Asian. “Once I did learn the truth, I had to think about why this information was lost to us,” he said afterwards, and he tied the discovery to his own adopted family, saying he loved that there was “an echo of that in my own family”.

What comes next is open in an unusual way. With Colin from Accounts finished, the partnership with Dyer is free for something new, and he has promised that “there’ll always be laughter in what we do”. Last Seen has shown he can carry a prestige thriller on his own, and The Devil Wears Prada 2 has put his face in front of more people than three decades of Australian television managed. The baby who was not expected to live beyond a few months turned fifty this year, and for the first time the question is not whether the industry will make room for him, but which of the rooms he decides to walk into.

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Tags: actors, Australian cinema, Last Seen, Patrick Brammall, The Devil Wears Prada 2, Colin from Accounts

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