Interview: Jake Dunn on ‘My Brilliant Career’
It’s been just over a year since Jake Dunn first turned heads with his devastating, deeply constructed turn as Liam in Paris Lees’ What It Feels Like for a Girl. In the year since, the acclaimed BBC Three series has continued to build the kind of dedicated, deeply invested audience that few shows of its size manage to earn, one that has now taken it all the way to five nominations at this year’s BAFTA TV Awards, including a much-deserved Best Actor nod for lead Ellis Howard. Dunn, meanwhile, has been keeping himself busy. In the twelve or so months since we last spoke to him, the actor has stepped into the shoes of Stanley Kowalski in a much-praised production of A Streetcar Named Desire at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, wrapped a small independent short with celebrated photographer Alasdair McLellan, and, most recently, disappeared to Prague and Berlin for the better part of six months to shoot his most highly anticipated role to date, playing a young Peter Guillam in the upcoming adaptation of John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies. And in the middle of all that, he shot a lush, sweeping new adaptation of Miles Franklin’s 1901 Australian classic My Brilliant Career, in which Dunn steps well outside of his comfort zone to turn in his first real romantic role.
A six-part Australian period drama from showrunner Liz Doran and directors Alyssa McClelland and Anne Renton, My Brilliant Career stars Philippa Northeast as Sybylla Melvyn, a headstrong, fiercely intelligent young writer growing up in rural Australia at the turn of the twentieth century who is determined to build a life for herself outside of the small, stifling role society has carved out for women like her. Instead, Sybylla sets her sights on writing, freedom, and mischief, much to the horror of everyone around her, including her wealthy grandmother Mrs Bossier (Anna Chancellor) and her deeply religious mother Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly). Complicating matters are the two very different suitors who orbit her over the course of the show’s six episodes: charming, wealthy rancher Harry Beecham (Christopher Chung), and Frank Hawden (Dunn), a stiff, awkward, emotionally-stifled young Englishman marooned in the Australian outback with no real friends and no way of getting home. Rounded out by an impressive supporting ensemble that includes Kate Mulvany, Alexander England, Sherry-Lee Watson, Alex FitzAlan and Miah Madden, the series arrived on Netflix in August as one of the most impressive and warmly-received Australian imports of the year.
For Dunn, the timing of What It Feels Like for a Girl‘s critical breakthrough couldn’t have been stranger. The actor was, at the time, in the middle of shooting My Brilliant Career on the other side of the world, entirely removed from the wave of cultural conversation the show was generating back home. “It was really interesting, because the show came out in June of 2025 and I was in Australia filming My Brilliant Career, so it felt like everything that was happening, I didn’t see it. It sort of existed for me as a thing on the other side of the world,” he recalls. “From what I gather, from when I got back, staying in touch with Ellis [Howard] and Hannah [Walters] all the time, it really felt like a moment when it came out. People talking about it, sort of swept up in it, which was so brilliant.”
“I both loved and feared the fact that I was on the other side of the world. I loved that it was happening away from me, because I think I can get quite shy with things like that. But I was really wondering what the feeling was,” he continues. “When I came back, we got to send it out in such a lovely way. We went to the BAFTAs because we had five nominations, and that was a really special moment for this incredible show on BBC Three that was becoming more and more radical overnight before its release. It just had such an incredibly warm response across the board. I’m so happy for that cast, and for Ellis especially, who was also nominated for Best Actor and who is so incredible in it.”
The show, Dunn says, has stayed with him in ways that few of his projects have, and it remains one of the few pieces of work he’s completely unafraid to talk about, or take real, uncomplicated pride in. “It’s something I feel really proud of. I feel really proud when I talk to people about it, and that’s not always the case. Often I think we can feel quite shy about our work, or shy about being an actor,” he reflects. “But that is something I love talking to people about, because I think people really meet it, and have a lot of interesting things to say. It has a lot of interesting things to say about class, about being queer and working class in the noughties. There’s a really interesting tension there. It’s rooted in the work. Paris [Lees], who wrote it, is working class. It was made by people who know that world.”
By the time My Brilliant Career landed on his desk, Dunn was several years into a career that had, largely, revolved around playing men with edges: antagonists, drug dealers, wild men. He was starting to worry that he was being sorted into a specific bracket, and that he might never really get the chance to try anything else. So when the audition for Frank came through, mid-run at the Crucible, he jumped at it. “At that point in my quote-unquote career, I was playing a lot of antagonists. I’d done Renegade Nell, I was playing Stanley Kowalski, and they were very different antagonists, but I was slightly in a place of fear that that was what I was going to get set into,” he admits.
“I had always felt that the romantic genre is sort of one of the most difficult things you can try and be in, because it’s also really personally scary sometimes. In a way of, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’m anything like what you’re dishing up for this part, or if I have the right look or the right body,'” he continues. “Any of those things can get in anyone’s head. To put yourself forward is quite a nerve-wracking thing. You’re trying to not be you, you’re being someone else. But Frank had all these qualities I hadn’t been able to grasp or look at in a part. He was really sincere, and definitely a little bit complicated, and had a bit of a chip on his shoulder. But I also felt like he was revealing, over the course of a season of television, over five episodes, that he was really lovely. And I wanted to run to that, because it felt like the absolute opposite of what I’d been allowed to do in casting up until that point.”
For anyone familiar with Franklin’s original novel (or Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar-nominated 1979 film adaptation), Dunn’s version of Frank Hawden might come as something of a surprise. In the book, he’s mentioned only in passing: a peripheral English suitor who barely registers as a character in his own right. On screen, however, in Dunn’s hands, Frank is a fully realised, aching young man, and it was the actor’s mission from the very beginning to make sure that dignity was never sacrificed at the altar of an easy joke.
“In the book, Frank is mentioned like four times. Frank isn’t really in the book, you know,” Dunn explains. “My big thing was, I didn’t want Frank to be a joke. I didn’t want Frank to be this bumbling Englishman who was funny because he was the English guy in Australia. I really wanted to fight for dignity for Frank, and the integrity of someone who yes, is a bit awkward and maybe a bit stifled in a lot of ways. But that was the great thing about Liz’s writing, the more time you spend around Frank, the more tender he is, and you were like, oh, he’s not just this stuck-up Englishman. That was what I thought was pretty attractive, and I wanted to keep that at any cost.”
Central to the show’s success is the crackling, deeply believable dynamic between Sybylla and Frank, a friendship-turned-something-more that Dunn and Northeast built together over a rare, precious week of rehearsals before shooting began. For Dunn, that early time together proved essential in nailing the tone of the characters’ relationship, which he describes as living somewhere between screwball comedy, siblinghood, and something a little more tender. “Philippa and I were given a week’s rehearsal before we started the show, which is very uncommon in TV,” he says. “We just spent the time walking around rooms together and working out what we thought, and we really landed on this sibling dynamic. My reference points were things like 10 Things I Hate About You, you know, the classic enemies-to-lovers dynamic.”
“But what I really loved about it, and what I thought was really vulnerable, and it was really clear in the script, was that because they start on such the wrong foot, and I think Frank thinks Sybylla is sort of feral, it meant that they were always honest with each other from the beginning,” he continues. “There’s something really tactile in their friendship. It’s almost quite physical with each other. They build things together, they collide into each other’s space. And he sort of turns around and he’s like, ‘Of course I love you, I wish I didn’t.’ It might be surprising, but it makes sense when you watch it.”
If getting the tone of the relationship right was one challenge, then figuring out how to inhabit a character as outwardly shy and internally tender as Frank was another entirely. Coming off years of playing men with edges (Renegade Nell, Streetcar, What It Feels Like for a Girl), Dunn found himself, in his own words, needing to recalibrate his very physicality for the role. Even the simple act of smiling on camera, he says, was harder than it had any right to be. “One of the funniest things about the job was that, this is going to sound really strange to say, but I think one of the most challenging things I find as a man acting sometimes is smiling, like, on-camera smiling. It’s a very strange thing to do for me,” he laughs. “I had spent many years on camera sneering at people, so it was a real recalibration. I spent a lot of that job just trying to be as light and sensitive as possible. There’s a real softness to that sort of thing that you have to try and commit to, and I found it, personally, quite nerve-wracking.”
The show establishes Frank as an Englishman sent to Australia on a year-long sabbatical to find a wife and secure his family’s inheritance, a stifling framing device that Dunn was determined to sharpen with an interior life of his own. In his version of Frank, the character has recently received a letter from his father back home, one that arrived only weeks before the events of the show, commanding him not to make contact with the family again until he is engaged to be married. It’s a small detail that never made it into the script itself, but one that quietly informed every second of Dunn’s performance, giving what could have easily been a stiff-upper-lipped English cliché a real, aching desperation underneath.
“I made a choice really early on. I found the thing that might be really useful for Frank was that, because Frank was sort of marooned in Australia in a way, sort of stuck there, I thought maybe a really interesting thing to play would be that he had received a letter, maybe in the last three months, from his dad saying, ‘Do not contact the family until you tell us you’re engaged,'” he explains. “So he was stuck with no one to talk to, and couldn’t go home, and couldn’t really make an alliance in Australia. There was this sort of… I always describe it as a weaponised vulnerability with him.”
“Frank puts down bush society quite easily, and I think it all reflected how unsure Frank was about his social situation,” he continues. “Then, almost cosmetically, there was something about what Frank was wearing. I wondered if Frank was wearing exactly, like, his dad’s clothes, like he was trying to look like his dad. There’s a lot to do with the dad, basically. There’s no reference in the script. It’s not useful to the story, which is Sybylla’s story. But for me, as Frank, I thought of him as not being allowed to be himself. He has to be his dad. And then Sybylla sort of lights this fire in him and he becomes himself again. He becomes this big kid who is mischievous and a lot, and suddenly the place he’s been marooned in is like the ultimate freedom, because no one knows him. He can just be himself.”
If there’s one thing that unites everything Dunn does in his performance as Frank, it’s a rare insistence on making the character feel more vulnerable than sexy, an approach that runs entirely counter to what audiences might expect from the romantic lead of a lush period drama. For Dunn, though, that was very much the point. “It’s a weird word to use, but in terms of the romantic genre, I wanted him to be the boy next door. I wanted him to be someone that, when I think about me in love, or me in pursuit of love, is really familiar, because I’m incredibly awkward. I’m incredibly embarrassed, I think I’m coming apart, I don’t feel sexy. I actually feel stupid and very vulnerable and like I’ve got egg on my face,” he reflects. “I was like, is there room to keep those things? Can the rules be that we keep it almost as un-embarrassing as possible, but as tender as possible, because that’s true, and this is true for me anyway. I’m not the wag-of-my-tail type. I’m the person that can run in and be like, ‘Look, I’m in love with you, I should just come clean.’ That’s maybe what I felt I had in common with Frank, or what we were sort of like a mission statement for that part: keep that slightly itchy, scratchy stuff that isn’t tidy.”
“And now, obviously, have as big a moustache as possible,” he laughs.
Perhaps most impressively, Dunn’s performance as Frank never once tries to push its way to the front of a show that is, unmistakably, Sybylla’s. A story of a young woman fighting for her own agency, her own voice, her own future. Instead, he holds his own quietly and confidently in the corners, letting Northeast’s revelatory lead performance drive everything, and serving the story wherever it needs him. “He is such a thread in what is a much more detailed story about a woman. It’s her life, and he is a story that comes in and out slightly, and I’m not mistaken about that,” he reflects. “I’ve been really lucky that I work with a lot of really exciting women in my career. Even when I first started working, I did this little BBC show called Get Even, which was for the women that led it, and then Renegade Nell was Louisa Harland, and then this. I’ve been so lucky to work with a lot of female directors and female writers.”
That instinct for service also shapes the way Dunn thinks about the ending of Frank’s arc, and the fact that, in defiance of every romantic-genre convention audiences might expect, Frank does not, in the end, get the girl. Rather than resent that outcome, Dunn embraced it, finding in Frank’s exit a kind of hard-won, quiet maturity that felt truer than any last-minute swoon ever could. “What was gorgeous was that Chris and I were both afforded a lot of time to breathe. You really spend time with Harry Beecham, and you really spend time with Frank, and through Sybylla’s eyes,” he says. “What’s gorgeous is that they don’t end up together. The story for Frank is that he learns how to go home and face his dad. And that’s because someone inspires him and makes him realise he’s not broken. That he does have a lot to give, and there is a lot of love. That’s one part of Sybylla’s journey. I mean, it’s such an interesting journey. The first time I read it, the book was so phenomenal. The ending is so surprising, and beautiful, and uncomfortable, and brilliant.”
“What it does, actually, for me, is take a lot of pressure off. Because I know that the story is not about Frank. You come in, and you serve as much as you can, and then you bounce off,” he adds. “And it’s all in Philippa’s hands, because she’s so amazing in that show. She held it with grace.”
If My Brilliant Career marks Dunn’s arrival as a fully-fledged screen romantic, then his next project may just be the biggest of his career to date. Hot on its heels comes A Legacy of Spies, the much-anticipated adaptation of John le Carré’s 2017 novel, in which Dunn steps into the shoes of a young Peter Guillam, the George Smiley-adjacent operative and long-standing le Carré fixture, previously played by Michael Jayston in the 1979 BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and by Benedict Cumberbatch in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film. It’s a role of extraordinary weight and expectation, and one that Dunn is cautiously, quietly excited about.
“I auditioned for it the day I flew back from Australia. I got the email through and was like, ‘Oh, wow,'” he recalls. “It’s been a long journey. I was in the mix for like seven months, maybe. It’s staggering. I really think it’s a staggering show. The people in it are unbelievable, and I feel crazy lucky. I wasn’t really that familiar with le Carré’s work before. But I think maybe it’s a good thing.”
Filmed across Prague and Berlin over the course of six months, the project marks Dunn’s biggest, most sustained screen role to date. “There’s such sprawling, huge, human stories. Peter Guillam is the part I’m playing. I got this part when I was 25, and we shot it when I’m 26. We have a younger Peter Guillam essentially in the first novel, for the first series, and I hope it’s a really interesting take on that part. It’s been really amazing. I can’t believe it.”
Elsewhere, Dunn recently wrapped a short film with the celebrated fashion photographer Alasdair McLellan, whom he cites as one of his most enduring creative inspirations. “I had an amazing time working with him,” he says. “He’s so inspiring to me. He’s my favourite image-maker. I sort of think he’s a god, and he’s the loveliest person. He reached out. He’d seen What It Feels Like for a Girl, and we chatted, and we collaborated on this thing together, which was really lovely.”
With A Legacy of Spies coming down the pipeline, a lead role in a Netflix hit already released, a BAFTA-nominated show behind him, and a growing collection of independent film work to his name, Dunn now finds himself, somewhat improbably, in the middle of what he openly acknowledges is a charmed career moment. Still, if there’s one thing that’s evident from any conversation with him, it’s that he’d rather step away and disappear into his own life for a little while than throw himself into whatever comes next. “I did this opera called Last Days, and then I went straight into a play called Road at the Royal Exchange, and then I went straight into Legacy of Spies. So I’ve been back-to-back for ten months, which is unbelievable,” he laughs. “I sort of want to take a step back for a little while, and just look at a tree or something.”
“I don’t know what’s next. I don’t have anything lined up, and I’m a little bit ambiguous when it comes to intention,” he continues. “I find intention quite abstract. I’m much more subject than a project. I don’t know what I would want until I see it, that’s often my way. Then suddenly I’m like, all or nothing. But right now, it’s just feeling really lucky, and probably sitting down reading those books and cleaning the house or doing the washing up. It’s going to be quiet for a while.”
My Brilliant Career is now streaming on Netflix.