A Decision to Walk Away
Patrick Brammall had already said no. Not just to any role, but to a film most actors would jump at the chance to be part of. A sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, a franchise so deeply embedded in pop culture it’s almost mythic, and with a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, and Meryl Streep—every actor’s dream collaborator.
But for Brammall, the decision was clear. He turned down the opportunity, not out of disinterest or lack of ambition, but because he understood the weight of his current life. “I respectfully won’t put down a tape because I don’t have the time,” he explained. “To put down a good tape… it takes half a day. You’ve got to learn it, make things to do the takes, edit it… and I didn’t have the time.”
At the time, he was in Melbourne, juggling a long shoot, living with his wife, Harriet Dyer, and their two young daughters. Their lives were full, and an international move for Harriet’s career was on the horizon. “I can’t leave it all to the nanny,” he told Kate Langbroek. “I’ve got to be there.”
There was another layer to his decision, one that spoke more to self-awareness than logistics. “As if they’re going to f-ing put me in this,” he laughed. “That’s not me being modest… I was just like, the chances of me getting that are so small.”
A Life Beyond Hollywood
For an Australian actor, such a decision feels radical. It goes against the long-standing narrative that success here is only a stepping stone to something bigger, something global. But by the time the offer came, Brammall had already built a life that didn’t depend on that next step.
His life is inseparable from his relationship with Harriet Dyer, a partnership that exists both on and off-screen. Together, they co-created Colin from Accounts, a series that has found a global audience. “No one makes me laugh more than she does,” he said. “We’ve got a really shared, singular point of view… we enjoy each other.”
It’s a relationship built on creative alignment and the daily realities of raising a family, balancing work, and navigating an industry that rarely accommodates either. “It’s f-ing hard at times,” he admitted, with candour that contrasts with the polished version of that life audiences might imagine. “But also it’s joyous.”
This fullness, this sense of having already arrived somewhere meaningful, underpins his decision to walk away from The Devil Wears Prada.
Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, Image: Getty
The Unexpected Offer
A few days later, he received another message—not asking him to reconsider, but offering him the role outright. “I got a text from the director… saying, ‘Hey, I know you’ve already said no, but we’d really love you to do it,'” he recalled. “And it was a straight-up offer.”
Suddenly, the decision he had made in theory became something far more immediate, far more real, and far harder to walk away from. Because it’s one thing to say no to an audition, and another entirely to say no when the role is already yours.
What followed was not a moment of wide-eyed excitement, but a practical conversation, a series of questions about how to make something seemingly impossible fit into a life that was already at capacity. “Our first thought was, how do we make this work?” he said. “Because I have to do it… they’ve offered it to me.”
“We just had to expand to meet the challenge,” he added, a line that neatly captures not just that moment, but the broader way he seems to approach both his career and his life.
A New Chapter
Now, as the film is released and Brammall steps onto a global stage, there is already a sense of that shift taking place, even if he resists the language that comes with it. At the New York premiere, he found himself able to move largely unnoticed, the weight of attention carried instead by “the legacy cast,” the very people whose names had made the original film iconic.
He joked to Kate that, in that context, he was simply “the Australian guy,” a moniker that both underplays and neatly encapsulates the position he occupies within the film.
Sitting in that theatre, watching the film for the first time, that perspective began to shift. As he describes it on No Filter, there was an initial tension, a kind of instinctive bracing as he waited to see how he would come across, followed by something else entirely as the film unfolded and he saw himself not as an outsider to that world, but as part of it, someone who belonged there, who fit within it, who hadn’t, as he half-jokingly puts it, “f***ed it up.”
Reflections on Timing
It is, in many ways, the moment where the external narrative catches up with the internal one, where the idea of being a leading man stops feeling theoretical and starts to feel, however reluctantly, real. “I just turned f-ing 50,” he told Kate, laughing at the absurdity of it. “I’m not a leading man… but technically, I am.”
That contradiction sits at the heart of this moment for him, not because he doubts his ability, but because of when it has arrived. “I’m like, oh f***, wouldn’t it have been good if this kind of opportunity had happened 20 years ago,” he reflected. “But I know I wouldn’t have been ready.”
What follows is not regret, but clarity, a recognition that timing is not just about opportunity, but about perspective, about the ability to understand what something means without letting it consume everything else. “I would have got caught up in it, and think that it was truly valuable,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known the value of other things.”
Those “other things” are not abstract, either, and as he tells Kate on No Filter, they are what anchor him in a moment that could otherwise feel overwhelming. “I have tiny people who depend on me… and that’s more important than this.”
