A lot of really cool things happen when you write a quirky little TV show and it becomes a global sensation. First, as Harriet Dyer will tell you, your DMs blow up with mates congratulating you on your success. Then you find yourself jetting back to Australia from your home in Los Angeles to pick up an armful of the nation’s most sought-after awards. Next, the BAFTAs call to ask you to present one of their awards and, in the meantime, everyone wants to either: a) interview you; b) hire you; or c) photograph you in designer dresses. OK, that last one is us.
As Dyer reclines on a sofa in a shimmering green Armani ensemble for our shoot and surveys our style and photography team, she says she can’t quite believe that Colin from Accounts – the hit show she co-wrote and stars in with husband Patrick Brammall – has so comprehensively transformed her life. Its second season is now streaming on Binge (the first season was the Foxtel Group’s most-watched original scripted series of all time), but Dyer wryly notes that it doesn’t seem so long ago that her childhood amateur dramatics were getting little write-ups in the Townsville Bulletin in Queensland.
Director: Andrew Marsh
She goes on to say that for all the apparent signs of success, there’s been a much more personal and life-changing outcome from her comedy triumph: she’s realised she is her husband’s equal. “I always thought that maybe he was a lot smarter than me,” reveals Dyer, 35, whose age gap with Brammall, 48, is mirrored in their Colin from Accounts characters, Ashley and Gordon. “I now feel like I can go toe to toe. I can hold my own in a room filled with creatives or executives or heads of department, and I can stand there next to him and my voice is as valid as his.” Dyer has thought about this a lot. She references a Michael Leunig cartoon captioned “The invention of the pedestal” where one person has dug out the earth from underneath themselves to make the pedestal for the other person. “I definitely feel like there’s no pedestal now, which is great because I think pedestals and relationships are no good,” she says.
While Colin from Accounts started as a fledgling writing exercise to get Dyer out of the house after finishing the TV series Love Child in 2017, the show – which kicked off with a nipple flash and a dog (Colin) being hit by a car – has become a worldwide phenomenon. For audiences steeped in the likes of Bondi Rescue and the Irwin family’s TV offerings, this clever little comedy has not only showcased a different side of Australia but also been the forerunner to shows such as Fisk and Deadloch also attracting international attention.
Dyer believes it’s our ability to laugh at ourselves – interwoven with “toilet humour” – that makes the show appealing, as well as the fact it was accessible in the UK (where it screened on the BBC). “I think [the Brits] were able to laugh at these rambunctious little Australians doing crazy things as, like, their weird cousin Down Under,” she says. “There was a warmth that they felt seeing the show and I think we were just similar enough in terms of our sensibilities and just fresh enough as in something different.”
Interestingly, Colin doesn’t rely on stunning beaches or sunshine or even the sort of aspirational style narrative we saw in Offspring to seduce viewers. Instead, it’s set in a nondescript suburb where the characters are the focus. “Neither of us are beachy people,” explains Dyer, pointing out her fair skin and that she grew up with “weird auburn hair”. “Patty grew up in Canberra, which is landlocked, and I grew up in Townsville, which is coastal but everything kills you in the water up there so it’s not really part of my blood. I lived in Sydney for, like, 10 years and I never swam at Bondi. It’s just not in my DNA. That’s perhaps why the UK loved it so much, because it felt a little bit like their backyard but removed.”
I’m somebody who feels a little more comfortable in the passenger seat
Harriet Dyer
Dyer and Brammall squeezed in our shoot during the final editing for the second season of the show, which still features the beleaguered dog but branches into storylines as amusing as the first series. Meeting the tight production deadline as well as caring for their two-year-old daughter, Joni, meant that Dyer’s usual exercise routine went out the window. “The edit is so stationary,” she explains. “You’re sitting down staring at yourself on television for eight hours a day for several weeks. There’s no gym, no sunlight, no-one doing your hair, so I was like, ‘If you want to shoot me at the end of the edit, I will be a troll.’”
For the record, she looks like the furthest thing from a troll and, to her credit, laughs when the first outfit for the shoot is a skin-revealing bra top and skirt by Prada. At least, she points out, she managed to get her roots coloured the night before. In any case, this juggle between conflicting demands is something she has learnt to manage since she and Brammall began shooting the show when their daughter was just four months old.
In fact, as she accepted the award for Most Outstanding Actress at last year’s Logies (Brammall also won Most Outstanding Actor, and the show won Most Outstanding Comedy Program as well as the AACTA Award for Best Narrative Comedy Series), Dyer gave a poignant shout out to all new mums and dads who go back to work after having children. “It is scary but you can do it,” she told the audience. “Do it all and then you can look back and show them you did it, and then they can do it too.”
Back home in LA following our shoot, Dyer is sitting cross-legged on the sofa and chatting via Zoom while Brammall is out collecting Joni from day care. She says she was talking to herself as much as the audience when she made the Logies speech, particularly since she and Brammall had left Joni back in the US with a nanny for three days so they could attend the awards. “I still have to tell myself that she’s not suffering because her mum works,” she says. “I think the advice you give is the advice you need the most.”
Mother’s guilt, she explains, was something she wrestled with even before they adopted their daughter. “I said to Patty before he was a dad, ‘Are you worried that your work will suffer?’ and
he was, like, ‘Nah’. That’s so male, isn’t it?” In fact, Dyer was so worried about the tussle between career and motherhood that she wrote a message to herself on an index card and stuck it on the wall behind her desk. “You can have it all,” read the note, which she would look at during the long hours toiling on the Colin script and other projects.
We still laugh a lot and we are also learning to protect our relationship
Harriet Dyer
She was partly concerned that Joni wouldn’t have the idyllic childhood she had enjoyed with a mother and grandmother who were always present and, she adds, it’s also taken her a while to lean into her own ambition. “I’m somebody who feels a little more comfortable in the passenger seat,” explains Dyer. “My natural propensity is to sit back and coast a bit because I’m really comfortable in a slower speed. I was a painfully shy kid – I didn’t leave my dad’s leg at barbecues – so it’s a huge journey to go from that kid to a woman who is running a show.”
What makes Dyer so compelling both in person and in her work are these very human conundrums and contradictions. She’s a small-town girl living a big-city life where, she fears, Joni won’t get to experience a childhood running between friends’ houses to swim in the pool and jump on the trampoline.
Likewise, Dyer admits she’s an introvert in an extrovert industry. As she says, Brammall has learnt that when she goes quiet in the car on the way to an event or meeting, she is harnessing her energy. “Patty is an extrovert. He walks into a room and he’s charged up and people give him energy but it’s the opposite for me,” she explains. “Beforehand, I go a bit remote. I call it charging my butterflies and when my butterflies are charged I can let them be free and they can be really colourful and bright and fabulous.”
There’s also the challenge of setting boundaries around their marriage, particularly since their relationship was the springboard for the Colin script and its subsequent success. The couple, who met while working on the Stan series No Activity in 2015 and married five days after Brammall proposed in 2021, not only write, produce and act together but their real-life age gap is also replicated and mined for laughs onscreen.
Dyer jokes that they’ve spent so much time together she’s probably suffering from Stockholm syndrome, before adding that she feels “lucky” they balance each other out. “We still laugh a lot and we are also learning to protect our relationship,” she says. “We want to make good television but we are learning to put up some boundaries because in the middle of this is our love and … our union … and we can’t keep shopping that out for the sake of a good TV show.”
Of course, it helps that television’s funniest couple clearly really like working together. “We have a very shared sensibility,” explains Dyer, who says the pair had to push through “second-album feelings” to write season two. “We’re a bit of a two-headed beast and it’s only about 5 per cent of the time that we are on the opposite side of something.”
Dubbed “Scoop” by her parents, Mark and Diana, who observed her childhood talent for telling a great story, Dyer says becoming a writer has left her with a “stickier brain”. While Brammall is better at keeping notes on his phone, she’s a bowerbird, collecting great anecdotes and character traits wherever she goes. “My high school girlfriends know that their lives are fair game to me,” she says.
Colin, according to one review, is a show that makes you feel as if you’re among your people. It’s cheeky rather than rude, flirty rather than full-on sexy, and awkward in a way we can all relate to. As Brammall has previously said, it’s “com” before it’s “rom”. During filming, the show got a reputation for being a special production to work on, though as Dyer points out that could’ve been because she and Brammall sometimes taped $100 notes to secret spots on the set and challenged the crew to find them.
With the second season now streaming, the obvious question is: what’s next? It’s safe to say that the talented pair are much in demand. “We have these great meetings on the books now with people here who love the show,” says Dyer. “So it’s going to open doors for us, but we want to be very particular about what we do next and who it’s with.”
In the meantime, the pair are now reunited with their own dog, Walter, and are enjoying time with Joni (who is named after Dyer’s grandmother, Joanie, who died six months after the couple’s baby was born). The actor is back in her favoured slower pace, doing simple things with her daughter. “Anytime I just sit with her and do anything with her it’s good and time stops,” she says. “I just love all of it – even when it’s hard.”
And while success has helped her shift the impostor syndrome in her professional life, Dyer admits she’s still finessing the role that means the most to her personally. “I love trying to challenge my own patience and work out how much bigger I can be [as well as] less petty and less grumbly,” she says. “Joni deserves such a good mum, so I’m always trying to step up and into a better version of myself. I just truly care about her in a way that I’ve never cared before.”
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