Matt Charman is a British screenwriter, playwright, and producer. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his 2015 film Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg and co-written with Joel and Ethan Coen. Charman started out writing for theatre, making his breakthrough as writer-in-residence at London's National Theatre, where then director Nicholas Hytner described Charman as having "a priceless nose for a story.".
Plays
Charman's first play, A Night at the Dogs, won the 2004 Verity Bargate Award for emerging writers and appeared at Soho Theatre. He went on to write The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder and The Observer, about a UN election observer’s intervention in West African nation’s political crisis. Both were produced and staged at the National Theatre In 2012, Charman’s play Regrets, starring Ansel Elgort, opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. Set in McCarthy-era America, the play follows four men in a Nevada desert boarding house waiting out the six weeks required for a no-fault divorce. The Machine, directed by Josie Rourke, opened at the Manchester International Festival in 2013 and transferred to the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The play told the story of Garry Kasparov’s defeat to IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue in 1997, the first time a computer beat a reigning chess world champion under tournament conditions. Future theatre projects for Charman include an adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck for the stage, and a play for Nicholas Hytner’s new London Theatre Company.
Television
Charman’s television work includes Our Zoo for the BBC, which tells the story of the founding of Chester Zoo, famous for having no bars. In 2015, Charman’s police drama Black Work, starring Sheridan Smith, aired on ITV. The show was ITV's biggest new drama of the year.
Films
Charman's first feature was Suite Française co-written with director Saul Dibb, starring Michelle Williams, Kristin Scott Thomas and Margot Robbie. His 2015 feature, Bridge of Spies, was directed by Steven Spielberg, co-written by Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen and starred Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, and Amy Ryan. Set in Brooklyn and Berlin, the film tells the story of James B. Donovan, an American lawyer who in 1962 negotiated the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for the captured pilot of a downed U-2 spy plane, Francis Gary Powers, and American student Frederic Pryor. The film was critically acclaimed, with the New York Times calling it “a consummate entertainment that sweeps you up with pure cinema.” and the New York Post calling it Spielberg's best film since Saving Private Ryan. Charman's script was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at both the 2016 Academy Awards and BAFTA Awards. He was also nominated for a WGA award and Critics' Choice award in the same category. Bridge of Spies was a box office hit, grossing $165.5 million worldwide and receiving six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, winning Best Supporting Actor for Mark Rylance's performance as Rudolf Abel. Charman wrote a second screenplay for Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners, based on Walter Cronkite’s 1968 visit to Vietnam.
Producing
Charman runs his own production company, Binocular, based in London. He was executive producer on Operation Finale, written by Matthew Orton, about the hunt for Adolf Eichmann. The film was directed by Chris Weitz. Charman is currently executive producer on Liberty Road, written by Neil Widener and Gavin James, an adaptation of George Koskimaki’s book "The Battered Bastards of Bastogne" for Fox 2000 about a key conflict during the Battle of the Bulge. Charman is also executive producing another upcoming film written by Widener and James, Battle of Alcatraz..
Charman was born in West Sussex, England, where he attended Forest School, Horsham. He then went on to study English literature at University College London. While a student, he frequently snuck into plays and musicals for free during intervals, and “tried to figure out what happened in the first act.” In the mid-2000s, Charman did uncredited script work for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 and 10,000 BC.
Awards and honours
2004 – Verity Bargate Award for his debut play A Night at the Dogs
