In his new film,  Ruben Guthrie, Brammall felt this most acutely; it's his first leading role in a film, he's in every scene, and he's playing a character closely identified with the director.

"It was a leap of faith for him, too, casting me," Brammall says of director Brendan Cowell, who wrote and directed Ruben Guthrie after adapting it from his play of the same name.

The dark comedy is the story of a high-flying, hard-living advertising executive who undertakes a year of sobriety after he breaks his arm during a drunken party and his fiancee (Abbey Lee) leaves him. He has to learn how to live in a booze-soaked culture, where everyone from his mother (Robyn Nevin) to his best friend (Alex Dimitriades) want him to jump whole-heartedly off the wagon.

There are sombre moments mixed with   riotous comedy, but Brammall says it's not a distinction he drew at the time. "I never played it as a comedy, because anyone who's any good at comedy never plays if for laughs. And because I'm Ruben, and I'm in the middle of a shit storm, it never felt like a comedy to me."

For Brammall, one of the key scenes comes when Ruben reluctantly attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and is brought to tears when   prompted to speak about a close school friend.

"We tried six or seven takes, and each time something different popped out," Brammall says. "It's the most vulnerable Ruben gets. I didn't go into the details with Brendan, but I knew it was a personal story for him, the whole film is."

For the past few years, Brammall has been Mr Everywhere on Australian television, breaking through in the 2012 ABC comedy A Moody Christmas as the obnoxious older brother Sean, followed by more comedies The Strange Calls, A Gentleman's Guide to Knifefighting, Upper Middle Bogan and another series of The Moodys.

He's flexed his drama chops, too: as Kim Beazley in the political telemovie Hawke and as Rupert Murdoch in  Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch Story. But it was his pivotal role in the final series of popular TV series Offspring that brought him to the attention of many women - as the love interest Leo to the series' heroine Nina Proudman.

With such a solid body of work over the last few years, it is surprising to hear the 38-year-old struggled to get a foot in acting school.

After   enrolling in an arts-law degree in his home town of Canberra, he finished the arts component and then he decided he couldn't face law. He had already auditioned for the major drama institutions, and missed out, so he did a year-long part-time course at the  Actors' Centre in Sydney, but still couldn't get into any of the leading drama schools. He was told he should travel, study overseas, live a little, and he was saving up for this, when a place at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne opened up.

Now he is busy juggling roles, mixing more TV drama (the new ABC series Glitch) with another comedy series, No Activity, with his Moodys compatriot Darren Gilshenan. It grew out of an improvised piece in which the pair played   cops on a stake-out in which nothing ever happens  The series was expanded to include a couple of criminals, and two officers back at dispatch, all caught up in the same cycle of inertia, waiting for something to happen.

Brammall says improvising is a skill that can be taught and honed. "You can't be too relaxed together, it's always good to have an element of danger."  Silence is important, he says, and the temptation to fill it has to be resisted. "When you let it breathe is when it works better, it's funnier and more surprising. The more I think about it, the more I think that comedy is about rhythm and surprise."

Brammall has been busy offscreen, too, writing his own work, including an award-winning play in 2006, The Suitors, with friend John Leary, which led to a commission for another, Vital Organs, at Belvoir Street Theatre.

He has also written for The Moodys, and continues to work on generating material - "It's such a plate-spinning act, trying to line up jobs and keep available for things" - including overseas work. He recently shot a pilot for US station NBC, a remake of The Strange Calls, and he auditioned for the same part he took in the original. Whatever happens with it, he says, "I made some friends, I'll go back and keep that bubbling away."

In the midst of all this activity, Brammall decided he needed some time out. Part of the context for this was something about the actor's life.

"Actors are treated well on the set, like you're a special child," he says. "People look after you, it's 'stay out of the rain, and I'll get you a coffee'. And after a while you can go, 'where's my coffee, where's my umbrella?' You can become a bit of a child."

It can be a reason, he says,  why some actors "put on diva turns, because they've been treated like children but they're aware that they've been disempowered somehow".

He took a break for a month and walked across Spain, following the famous pilgrimage route from the French border to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

"It really was a metaphor for life, getting up and walking from A to B every day. And of the absurdity of life as well. I spent 34 days walking roughly 800 kilometres, and you could drive it in a day," he says.

"I didn't go to make friends, but I made connection with different people. You cut through the small talk pretty quickly and get to the big things - most people are there because they want to have a think about their lives."

It was painful and tiring trip;  he went through three pairs of boots, and got inflammation of the achilles tendon in both feet at different times. However, despite the pain, it was exactly what he needed, and he's still working out its implications.

"In life, we're accustomed to not letting go of things, and we're accustomed to feeling we can control things as well. Someone said to me, 'Don't finish the Camino at Santiago, keep it with you.' And I do remind myself of it, if I'm tense or anxious or angry or whatever it is."

What he's taken from it, he says, is "to try to open up a bit more; surrendering to things is so much more effective than trying to control them".

"But if I did that all the time, I wouldn't be an actor, I'd be a monk."

Ruben Guthrie opens on July 16.