Josh Charles used to worry. He had played jerks, schmucks, mean preppies with popped collars. Was that how people thought of him?
On the set of the 2015 movie “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp,” in which Charles sported not one but three popped collars, he remembers turning to the co-writer Michael Showalter and saying: “I want people to know I’m not an [expletive]. I’m not saying I’m perfect or anything, but I pride myself on being a good human being.”
Charles, 54, told me this story at a restaurant near his Greenwich Village home, on the first night of Hanukkah. (He celebrated with ribs, cooked crispy, and an old-fashioned.) We met to talk about his new Fox comedy, “Best Medicine,” in which he plays another jerk, and he seemed determined to widen the gap between actor and role.
He chose a chair facing out and greeted the waiters by name. I returned from the restroom to find him cutting it up with a family at the next table. Somehow he had steered the conversation to the Baltimore Ravens, and he also made sure to point out that his ring, an anatomical heart, was designed by his wife, the former ballerina Sophie Flack.
So yes, the good human stuff was at the fore. Certainly that’s how many of his colleagues see him. The entertainment industry thrives on flattery and mutual admiration, of course, but the praise I heard of Charles was intemperate, unbridled.
“Josh is kind of a perfect man,” the writer and producer Robert King told me the day before this dinner. Charles’s current co-star, Annie Potts, had used similar words: “He’s sort of the ideal guy.” Showalter, who had little memory of their on-set conversation, called him “a wonderful guy, a lovely human.”
Still, a tension between decency and arrogance enlivens Charles’s best characters, like Dan, the anchor he played in “Sports Night,” or Will, the brash lawyer of “The Good Wife.” Those same qualities reappear, in comic form, on “Best Medicine,” which premieres on Sunday
An adaptation of the British series “Doc Martin,” it stars Charles as Martin Best, a go-getter heart surgeon with a ruinous bedside manner who relocates to rural Maine. Will the quirky locals teach him to open up to friendship and love? Seems likely.
The title role on a network show is a no-brainer for most working actors. Charles struggled with it. His most satisfying acting experiences have come in roles that initially scared him, he said, and he has a hard time trusting jobs that feel offered up on a platter. “I’ve just always been like, I don’t know, that seems too easy,” he said.
“Then you don’t work,” he continued. “Then suddenly you’re taking something even worse than maybe you thought that would have been, but you need the money and you need to work. So that’s how my career’s gone: It’s been feast or famine.”
“I just want to do good work,” he said finally. He sounded very serious. Then he softened. “Would you kill me if I got a sundae?”
AS THE RAVENS AFFILIATION suggests, Charles grew up in Baltimore, the younger son of an advertising executive and a gossip columnist. Taken to open mic nights in elementary school, he was drawn to comedy. Then he spent a life-changing summer at a theater camp. He made his professional debut at 15, as a sneering teen in the John Waters film “Hairspray.”
Two years later, having dropped out of high school, he was playing a prep school kid in the 1989 movie “Dead Poets Society,” a box office hit that won the Oscar for best screenplay. Ethan Hawke, a co-star, remembered Charles as a funny teenager who loved acting and would talk about Baltimore sports until your ears bled. (That endures: Both actors appeared in the video for Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight,” and on set Charles cornered Swift’s fiancé, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, to talk about a bad call against the Ravens.)
“He had a toughness about him,” said Hawke, who counts Charles as a close friend. “He wasn’t silly or superficial. He was smart, and he understood before I did the game of the business.”
Charles wouldn’t necessarily agree with that last part. In the years after “Dead Poets,” he did movies (“Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” “Threesome”) without ever becoming a movie star, guided less by career savvy than by a desire to avoid repeating himself. “I knew I wanted to be a real actor,” he said. “Because that other stuff, it didn’t feel enduring. It didn’t feel real.”
He doesn’t regret particular choices, though he seemed to struggle to understand why he had said no so often. “It’s not holding out because I think I’m better,” he ruminated between bites. “I want to do work that pushes me.”
Often he found that onstage, starring in plays by Richard Greenberg, Caryl Churchill and Young Jean Lee. Anna D. Shapiro, a theater director who has worked with Charles often, said he brings surprising depth to his roles.
“He’s got so much more going on inside of him than people can see,” she said. “But they can feel it.”
Still, theater doesn’t pay much, and Charles had to support first himself, and then a family. (He and Flack have two children.) Sometimes that meant taking what was available or doing his best in difficult situations. In 1998, he signed on to the Aaron Sorkin comedy “Sports Night,” his first major television project. The show was critically acclaimed, but he had friction with Sorkin.
“I like working with people that collaborate, that care about other people’s opinions,” he said. That wasn’t his relationship with Sorkin. (Sorkin, reached through a representative, declined to comment.)
He acted sporadically over the next decade, returning to prominent roles with an arc on the HBO therapy series “In Treatment,” in which he played an unhappy husband, and on “The Good Wife,” in which he played the eventual love interest of the series star, Julianna Margulies. That character, Will, wasn’t intended as romantic or written as particularly aggressive, but Charles’s charisma changed that.
Robert and Michelle King, the show’s creators, noticed that Charles could bring a sense of competition to a scene, a genius for attack. But the audience still loved him. “It’s amazing how many bad things he did in our show,” Robert King said. “But you don’t blame him.”
After four seasons, Charles felt restless. He opted not to renew his contract, and he and the Kings devised a shocking shooting death for his character in the middle of the fifth. It took fans a while to get over it. (In the 2016 comedy “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” the rapper Nas says, “I haven’t been that sad since they killed Josh Charles on ‘The Good Wife.’”)
I asked Michelle King if they have forgiven him for ordering Will’s execution. “Oh good heavens, there was nothing to forgive!” she said. The Kings hope to work with Charles again.
OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, Charles has immersed himself in darker fare.
He took roles in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and in “The Veil,” both starring Elisabeth Moss, and as a corrupt cop in the fact-based Baltimore limited series “We Own This City,” from George Pelecanos and David Simon. The chance to live in a lighter world felt welcome, which led him to “Best Medicine.”
Liz Tuccillo, the showrunner, had assembled a short list of actors to play Martin. Charles was at the top. “They have to be very grumpy and very unlikable in one way, but of course deeply charming,” she said in a recent interview. Charles, colleagues told her, could do all that, and he also had a warmth that softened the character.
As Potts, who plays Martin’s aunt, said, “When you have a character that’s so brittle and unfriendly, it helps a lot to use an actor who is at their heart and foundation really kind and sweet.”
“Best Medicine” appealed to Charles because he enjoyed the British original, and he was interested in the kinds of life events that would render someone so cranky. The upstate New York location was also tempting, as were the opportunities for physical comedy.
“I love knocking stuff over and falling over and just being a fool,” he said.
What he found difficult — and this is arguably counterintuitive for an actor who has played so many jerks — was the misanthropy. “You’re building a show around someone who doesn’t like people very much,” he said. “It’s been hard.” What he likes is showing the vulnerability underneath all the grouchiness, the desire to be a decent guy. A guy a little more like Charles.
These days, Charles worries less about public perception. And seeing his name first on the call sheet of a network show — well, he’s adjusting.
“I never wanted it,” he said. “Now I’m doing it. I waited too long and I’m [expletive] old and tired. But I’m having fun.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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