Charles has a brother, Jeff in Baltimore, Maryland, and they are the sons of Laura, a gossip columnist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper, and Allan Charles, an advertising executive. He is of Jewish heritage on his father's side, and has described himself as Jewish. He began his career performing comedy at the age of nine. As a teenager, he spent several summers at Stagedoor ManorPerforming Arts Center in New York, and attended the Baltimore School for the Arts.
Career
Charles's film debut was in fellow Baltimore native John Waters' Hairspray in 1988. The following year, he starred alongside Robin Williams and Ethan Hawke in the Oscar-winning Dead Poets Society. Subsequent film roles have included Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Threesome, Pie in the Sky, Muppets from Space, S.W.A.T, Four Brothers, After.Life, Crossing the Bridge and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. On television, Charles played sports anchor Dan Rydell in Aaron Sorkin's Emmy Award-winning Sports Night, which ran for two years on ABC and earned Charles a Screen Actors Guild nomination. In 2008, Charles played the role of Jake in season one of HBO's In Treatment. In 2009, he returned to network television in the CBS drama The Good Wife. For his work on the series he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2011 and 2014. In 1986, Charles headlined a production of Jonathan Marc Sherman's Confrontation. In 2004, he appeared on stage in New York in a revival of Neil LaBute's The Distance From Here, which received a Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble Cast. In January 2006, he appeared in the world premiere of Richard Greenberg's The Well-Appointed Room for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and followed this with a run at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, portraying the cloned brothers in Caryl Churchill's A Number. In 2007, he appeared in Adam Bock's The Receptionist at the Manhattan Theatre Club. In 2011, Charles was the narrator of the debut episode for NFL Network's A Football Life on New England Patriotshead coachBill Belichick.
Personal life
In September 2013, Charles married ballet dancer and author Sophie Flack. Together, Charles and Flack have two children. On December 9, 2014, Flack gave birth to the couple's first child, a son named Rocco. On August 23, 2018, Charles revealed on his Instagram that Flack gave birth to their second child, a daughter named Eleonor. He is a fan of the Baltimore Ravens and Baltimore Orioles. In a few films, he donned an Oriole baseball cap.
