“Now serving G455 at Window No. 5” … “Now serving G456 at Window No. 12.”
Neither of us has an appointment at the DMV in Hollywood. But Harriet Dyer strolls through the sliding doors like she’s walking into another shift at work as the soothing automated voice directs harried visitors trying to get their driver’s licenses or transfer car titles. She just as quickly halts her stride, taking in the site as if she’s marveling at the details of the Sistine Chapel, only the ceiling here is adorned with a grid of buzzing fluorescent lights and hanging eye chart posters.
“Oh, my God, I can’t even tell you what I’m feeling,” she says, the lilt of her Australian accent coming through.
Who knew a place some consider to be one of the supreme symbols of American bureaucratic inefficiency could hold such wonder?
Maybe that’s being too generous. But it’s clear Dyer sees beyond its reputation as a place most people dread visiting now that she’s charged with depicting one of these state employees, whose ordinary lives are the basis for CBS’ new workplace comedy. Premiering Monday, “DMV” is set at a fictional East Hollywood location and orbits around an eclectic staff that is just trying to get through the daily grind of interacting with the public.
Dyer plays Colette, a five-year DMV veteran who is certain her days there — as a genial driving examiner trying to make it back to work unscathed as she rides shotgun with first-time drivers — won’t be forever. Really.
“She doesn’t think it sucks,” Dyer says. “She thinks life’s really cool because she gets a different backdrop every day. She has different people in their cars. She loves trying to get people their independence through driving; she wants people to pass. She’s a sunny person. She’s a breath of fresh air.”
There’s an upside for Dyer, too: “It helps that I’m not so plugged in to America’s relationship to the DMV. I don’t have a preconceived notion that people think the place is terrible.”
The 36-year-old actor is known primarily for her work in her native country, including TV series like “Love Child” and “No Activity.” But she’s become a talent to watch in the U.S. thanks to a string of television roles and a well-received turn as the co-creator and star of the hit Aussie rom-com series “Colin From Accounts,” which gained an American following when it became available to stream on Paramount+. “DMV” places her in the front seat, opposite Tim Meadows, of a broadcast sitcom.
Creator Dana Klein (“Friends,” “Fresh Off the Boat”) based the series both on personal experience — as a parent shuttling three eager-to-drive teenage kids to appointments — and a short story by Katherine Heiny titled “Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented” (a reference to nicknames given to customers). The story follows three driving examiners, including one named Colette. Klein says she needed an actor who could be fearless, lovable and terribly awkward. (Not a spoiler: The first episode has Dyer hanging from a bathroom window.)
“Harriet was my prototype from the jump,” says Klein, who is also co-showrunner alongside Matt Kuhn. “I had watched ‘Colin From Accounts’ and totally fell in love with her. She is so inherently likable. I find myself rooting for her in every situation.”
Meadows, who has worked with his share of funny people in his storied career, says Dyer is skilled at making her characters feel human: “She’s very good at doing physical comedy and big or broad strokes when it’s necessary. But she’s a really good actress and she can pull your heart strings too. She knows how to take it down and find the humanity.”
That interest is clear as Dyer takes in the humdrum slice-of-life shuffling about at a yawn’s pace from the waiting area on our recent field trip. She is unfussy and self-deprecating, dressed in jeans and a green T-shirt that features a woman doing a handstand split in front of the words “mental gymnastics academy,” which feels apt for how she’s processing this experience. She’s quick to share her regret at not bringing her license renewal paperwork with her: “I remembered too late,” she says. “Then I thought: the whole show is about how hard this is — what if I ruin the interview with my errand because I don’t have my birth certificate or something?” When the subject turns to her experience learning how to drive, her eyes grow wide recalling her experience with a driving instructor she met with once a week as a teen.
“I was shook at how big the blind spot was,” she says. “When [my instructor] was like, ‘You’ve got to check your shoulder,’ I’m like, ‘Why? I’ve never seen my mom or dad do that?’ She stood in my blind spot and waved her arms around. And I looked in this mirror and that mirror, and I couldn’t see her, and I was shook. To this day, I worry about them.” (She’d like the record to show that she’s stellar at parallel parking on the left side of the road.)
Dyer grew up in a place called Townsville and displayed a performative streak early on thanks, in part, to her father, a lawyer, who moonlighted as a musical performer. When he auditioned for a production of “Annie,” which features a host of kids, she and her older sister were eager to join. Her sister was cast as Annie and Dyer was cast as friend Molly — “Our dad was so stressed that we wouldn’t get in the chorus,” she says. “We f— cleaned up.”
The gig gave her an early lesson in the transformative wonder of the spotlight: “It was like a break from myself. It’s that same feeling between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ It’s like a meditation — I know that sounds crazy, but in that space, something takes over that isn’t my own brain and it’s this wonderful holiday.”
After graduating from drama school in Sydney, she maintained steady work in theater, film and TV. She moved to Los Angeles in 2017 with her husband, actor Patrick Brammall, who was adapting his improvised Australian series “No Activity” for CBS All Access (now Paramount+). But a few months in, Dyer, not used to not working, was struggling with boredom.
“I just had such a busy life in Sydney, and Patty was working on ‘No Activity’ all day, every day. And I was like, Pat, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna make it here.’ I’d never been depressed, but I was like, ‘Maybe I’m depressed?’ ” she recalled. “And he was like, ‘Why don’t you write something?’ We had gone for a hike up Beachwood [before that] and we kicked around an idea of a meet-cute that came out of an attraction and a car thing and a dog. I made notes on my phone. So, he was like, ‘What about that dog thing?’ ”
Dyer came across a Black Friday sale for Final Draft, the dominant screenwriting software in Hollywood, and made the purchase — “I had to delete the Sims off my computer to fit Final Draft on. That felt like killing a child. But I was like, ‘Maybe I need to grow up,’ ” she says.
A week later, she got to work. Dyer wrote the pilot for “Colin From Accounts” — then titled “Dog With Wheels” — in four days. “It just flew out my fingers,” she says. “I printed it, and it was like 2,830 pages.”
The story kicks off when an attractive woman, walking to work, catches the attention of an attractive man in his car at a stop intersection — as she crosses in front of him, she cheekily flashes her breast. He gets distracted and accidentally hits a wandering dog. Don’t worry — the dog, it turns out, is fine. But it needs their care — and the help of a wheeled contraption to get around.
It took a beat for “Colin From Accounts” to make it off the page. She landed the lead in NBC’s short-lived supernatural crime procedural “The InBetween” and booked a role in an Australian series “Summer Love,” an opportunity she stretched into a writing course by asking to join the room to “see how the sausage was made.” She had shared her pilot script as a writing sample. When a programming executive that worked at the company that streamed “Summer Love” left to oversee a production company, he remembered the script.
“Colin From Accounts,” which stars Dyer and Brammall, premiered its first season in Australia at the end of 2022 and earned several Australian awards (at the Emmy-equivalent Logie Awards and AACTA Awards); as it found an audience stateside, it scored nominations at the inaugural Gotham TV Awards. Still, Dyer was facing another challenging period in the lull between. “American Auto,” the NBC ensemble comedy she had been on, didn’t get renewed for a third season. And the worry began to set in.
“I had been working on ‘Colin’ and then I couldn’t book a job,” she says. “One morning, I’d gotten an alert saying I was going to lose my health insurance. So I was feeling a bit down in the dark. It just felt like I was losing my validity in this industry. The backdrop to ‘DMV’ coming along was Harri staring out the window going, ‘Am I dead here? Does anyone love me?’ ”
The call for “DMV” was a bittersweet whirlwind. It was looking like the pilot would shoot in Canada — and would stay there if it was picked up. She and Brammall, who now consider Los Angeles their home base, were in the process of adopting their second child. And she wasn’t sure what this job would mean for the future of “Colin.”
She was assured they would make it all work. And, she says, they have. But it’s a busy time. She has been working on scripts for the third season of “Colin” with Brammall in between filming “DMV,” and they’re nearly done with sketching it out. It’s set to go into production in January. (Brammall, meanwhile, has also been busy, going viral after being seen filming the sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada.” “I’m still laughing that she [Andy, Anne Hathaway’s character] is with him,” Dyer says with a chuckle. “He’s an absolute dreamboat. But I’m like, ‘What now?’ ” She says a friend printed a photo from that viral moment but placed Dyer’s face on Hathaway’s body, in which she’s wearing a blue sequin dress; it’s framed in Dyer’s trailer.)
“If it’s a day when I have a lot of words [to shoot for ‘DMV’], I can’t write because it’s just too much for my head,” she says. “In a way, it’s great because there’s no doom scrolling right now. I don’t have the time. I have to focus. But it’s a balance. Some days I have to go, ‘Harri, you can only work on ‘DMV’ today — and that is over 50% of the time.”
In a phone call, Brammall is as effusive in praising his wife’s driving skills — “I’ve got to say, she’s a good driver — perfect record. She’s well cast to play a driving examiner” — as he is in lauding her talents as a performer and writer.
“She’s got an incredible ability to write dialogue,” says Brammall, who splits writing duties on “Colin From Accounts” with Dyer. “I think writing has unlocked her confidence. She would write in a fever. I’d be like, ‘We’ve got to stop now, we’ve got that dinner thing’ or whatever it would be. And she would be like sweating. You could hear the writing from the other room. It was like she felt if she didn’t get it all out now, she’d lose it.”
It’s why Dyer appreciates the break and only having to worry about her performance on “DMV.”
“I like being a cog instead of the whole wheel,” she says. “I like feeling like it’s a team sport and knowing that if there’s issues, it’s not really my problem to solve them, but still using what I learned doing on ‘Colin’ as an advantage, and listening to my gut.”
But she’s always listening to the feedback. When asked about the type of performance that stands out to her, Dyer immediately names Toni Collette in “Muriel’s Wedding” and the intersection of hilarious and heartbreaking. It gets her thinking about a recent scene she shot for “DMV.”
In “DMV,” “Colette’s heart was a little broken,” she says. “And I have this line to myself, like, ‘See you at the next window.’ I’m so excited and so quick to go to drama and our director ran out. She’s like, ‘Oh, my God, the script supervisor was crying.’ I’m like, ‘Well, she must be having a bad day.’ And they’re like, ‘No, it was you. That was amazing. Let’s do it again.’ I did something else. She’s like, ‘This is so beautiful, but we’re making a network comedy.’ I don’t mind notes, but I think I realized how thirsty I was for a bit of quivering lip.”
And, let’s be honest, who hasn’t shed tears at the DMV?
The post Can the DMV make you laugh instead of cry? With Harriet Dyer, it’s possible appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
