Nicholas Braun is already sitting down when I enter the room, so I don’t get a chance to take in his full height – six-foot-seven – but it’s obvious that his legs do not easily fit into the space between the couch and the coffee table. I admit to the actor – who is in Toronto to talk about his new family-friendly film The Sheep Detectives – that I’ve done a little research on the tallest guys in Hollywood and, at the moment, I think he’s at the top of the list (with apologies to ’90s sitcom sidekick Brad Garrett of Everybody Loves Raymond who is two inches taller.) Someone nearby mentions that James Cromwell is six-foot-nine, but Braun is quick to point out, “Not anymore.” He’d know – as he played 86-year-old Cromwell’s grandson on Succession not that long ago. 

If it didn’t seem like Cousin Greg was that tall in Succession, it’s because the character – and Braun himself – walks self-consciously stooped over, and because most of the actor’s scenes were with Matthew Macfadyen (Tom Wambsgans) who stands six-foot-three. And Tom did everything he could to make Greg feel small: “You’re a giant,” he tells Greg in the first season, “you’re a clumsy, awkward giant.” 

Braun’s height often came into play behind the scenes, as well. First off, the cast was taught to carry themselves like the uber-rich, who apparently know better than to duck when getting into a private helicopter, as the blades are too high to make contact. “I still ducked,” says Braun. “I definitely did. How could I not? I can feel that thing right on top of me. The pilots would be, like, ‘No, no, no, it’s all right. It’s eight feet tall or something.’ But I’m like six-foot-seven, so for me that’s just a little too tight.” The other issue came up when Braun had to do scenes with some of his more diminutive co-stars, i.e. Kieran Culkin, the small and sarcastic Oscar winner who plays Roman, the small and sarcastic baby of the Roy family. I ask: “Did they have to put Kieran on an apple box next to you in order to keep you both in the frame?” Braun replies: “They might have. Yeah. They might have, which he hated.”

In Braun’s new film, his stature is used for comic effect (big guy/small car) but is way less fraught – his farm animal co-stars are not that sensitive about being vertically challenged. The actor plays Officer Tim Derry, a bumbling lawman in a small English village (yes, he’s doing an English accent) who, while trying to solve the case of a murdered shepherd (Hugh Jackman), finds that the victim’s sheep (voiced by the likes of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Brett Goldstein and Patrick Stewart) are more adept at detecting than he is. “I just wanted to approach everything dramatically with this part,” Braun tells me, “like making the stakes really high for Tim because nobody respects him. So I was trying to find the highs and lows of ‘please respect me, please respect me.’ Where he’ll do something stupid again, but he keeps trying…”

I hate to say it, but that sounds a little Cousin Greg-like. 

“When I read it, in the beginning, I thought, ‘He is kind of Greggy,’” says Braun. “And I’m not really trying to play parts that feel too reminiscent of him anymore. Even though I loved playing Greg and would have played him as long as [Succession creator] Jesse Armstrong wanted me to.” But Braun explains that on a TV show, a character like Greg couldn’t have that much of an arc – and was never going to be the hero. Whereas, Officer Derry can rise to the challenge. “I found places in the script where I thought, ‘Okay, here are things that I did not do in Succession.’ Like my character makes a big speech in front of the town at the end. Greg never got to be the man to stand in front of every townsperson, cracking the case.” 

He did get to stand in front of Congress, though. “Exactly,” he says. “And he could barely talk.”

Speaking of arcs, Braun says that Toronto played a big part in his own story, and he’s relishing being back in the city for the premiere of The Sheep Detectives. Braun started going to auditions and acting as a kid alongside his dad, who was making a late-career change from graphic design (he was part of the team that created the Rolling Stones lips logo). But as a kid, Braun’s height was a problem, “I wasn’t able to get parts playing anyone’s child ever,” he says, “unless it was, like, Will Ferrell or John Cusack maybe.” When he got his first film gig, the 2000 movie Walter and Henry (with John Larroquette and James Coburn), Braun moved to Toronto during filming. “We were staying at the Sutton Place Hotel,” says Braun, who was 11 at the time. “And I remember there was a spy store really close by [in Yorkville] and they had electric scooters. My little brother and I bought them and rode them all through the hotel. I mean, they’re everywhere today, but 26 years ago that was crazy.”

Braun has gone looking for the spy store again, but it’s gone. Still, he’s pretty psyched to be back here with his big sheep movie. “Who knew?” he says. For a single 38-year-old, who lives in New York and co-owns a very hip Lower East Side bar, Braun is walking that fine line of being proud of his talking animal movie – and a bit sheepish about it. After all, there has been so much focus and attention on what roles he and his former co-stars are taking post-Succession. “That pressure is real,” says Braun, who before this had a dual role in 2024’s SNL origin story movie Saturday Night, playing Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman. “So Jeremy [Strong] has chosen this to be the next thing and Kieran’s chosen this and [Sarah] Snook is doing that. And I’m trying not to be afraid of doing the right or wrong thing. I can’t think like, ‘Oh, what if people don’t think that’s cool?’ I’m just trying to keep my career full of fun things and just stay open to whatever it is – don’t try to create the perfect path.” 

With that, our time is over – and Braun stands up. Our height difference (I’m five-foot-three) feels so extreme that we take a photograph together for laughs. “I don’t think about how tall I am that often,” he says, looking at the picture. “I just don’t really realize it until I stand up straight – which I don’t do enough – and I see my body next to others.”