Matt Charman

Matt Charman (born June 5, 1979) is a British screenwriter, playwright, and producer from Horsham, West Sussex. 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 a breakthrough as writer-in-residence at the National Theatre in London, 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 (2007) and The Observer (2009), about a UN election observer's intervention in a 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 then 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 (2014) 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.