Matt Charman writes best when two people are in a room and one of them wants something. Give him a spy and a lawyer and he is patient and exact; give him a kidnapping and a cabinet and the plot moves faster than his people can think.
Fi1m perspective
Mark Rylance's spy in Bridge of Spies (2015) has a habit of asking "would it help?" whenever Donovan suggests he might be worried. It is a small line, and the script by Matt Charman with Joel and Ethan Coen keeps handing him small lines like it, so that the film's best scenes are two men in a room and one of them wants something. Ten years later, in Hostage (2025), Charman puts his political leaders in a room with a drug shortage and a kidnapping, and nobody has time to ask anything so quiet. That is the distance his career has travelled, and not all of it is progress.
He began in the theatre in the mid-2000s and was writer-in-residence at the National Theatre before his first credited screenplay, Suite Française (2014), written with its director Saul Dibb. Bridge of Spies followed a year later, for Steven Spielberg, and made his name. Since then most of his work has been television he has created himself: Black Work (2015) for ITV, the spy series Treason (2022) and Hostage, along with occasional films such as Killer Heat (2024). The subjects stay the same, intelligence, negotiation, people deciding what they owe to whom, and lately the person deciding is a woman in a job usually written for a man.
The research is real. Charman has said Spielberg's notes on Bridge of Spies amounted to "go deeper, just keep digging, find the grey stuff", and that film has grey in every corner, at least until its last twenty minutes turn sweet. We were more taken by the spy's stoop and his refusal to be alarmed than by anything the film says outright about the Cold War, and that patience is written in before it is played. The series do not have it. Hostage invokes power and misogyny, then hurries past the moment where either would shape a decision, and its medicine shortage exists mainly to give the thriller another emergency. Treason drew complaints from reviewers about plot holes. Five brisk episodes leave little time for the grey stuff, and so far Charman has chosen the pace.
We would send anyone to Bridge of Spies, and we would point out that he did not write it alone. Hostage is worth a wet evening if political thrillers are yours and you agree not to ask questions until the credits. The interesting film is the one he has not made yet: a true story, one room, and a collaborator who tells him to slow down.
Biography
Matt Charman is a British screenwriter, playwright and producer. Born on 5 June 1979 in Crawley, West Sussex, he began his career in theatre and served as writer-in-residence at the National Theatre in London.
His screen credits include the feature films Suite Française (2015) and Bridge of Spies (2015), the latter co-written with Joel and Ethan Coen and directed by Steven Spielberg, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. On television he created the series Black Work (2015), Treason (2022) and Hostage (2025), and wrote the pilot Oasis (2017). He has also worked as a producer on several of his projects.
