Five Emmy nominations and zero wins is the perfect summary of a career spent being the best part of everyone else's project.
At a glance
- Known for
- Character actor in *The Bear*, *Chicago Med*, *The West Wing*, and dozens of '90s ensemble films
- Before fame
- Attended twelve different schools across Asia as a diplomat's kid
- Off-screen
- Distantly related to Princess Diana through the Roche family
Rise to Fame
A Christmas party introduction to Bill Murray was the break that mattered. Murray caught one of his stage performances, liked what he saw, and recommended him to Jonathan Demme, who cast him in Married to the Mob in 1988. Before that, he'd been touring schools with Shakespeare and Company to earn his Equity card, grinding through Boston's amateur theater scene after studying drama at Tufts.
The film career that followed reads like a roll call of '90s ensemble casts. Flatliners, The Three Musketeers, A Time to Kill, Indecent Proposal. He wasn't the lead in any of them. He didn't need to be. He made pompous, amoral scoundrels his calling card, playing each one with enough warmth that audiences rooted for the villain's lawyer.
In the Spotlight
He currently holds down two of the most watched shows on television at the same time. On Chicago Med, he's played Dr. Daniel Charles, the hospital's head of psychiatry, since the show launched in 2015. On The Bear, he plays Uncle Jimmy, a restaurant lender whose financial stake in the kitchen comes with strings nobody wants to pull on. The 2023 Emmy nomination for The Bear was his fifth overall and his first in fifteen years.
Five nominations, zero wins. The West Wing, Huff, Nip/Tuck, The Bear. He keeps getting recognized just enough to confirm what everybody already knows, but never enough to put the trophy on the shelf. The industry respects him the way you respect furniture that holds up every room it's in.
Side Notes
Twelve schools across two continents will do things to a kid. His father Nicholas Platt was a career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Zambia, and the Philippines, and accompanied Nixon on the 1972 trip to China. The family bounced from Hong Kong to Beijing to Tokyo before he landed at Tufts, where he met Hank Azaria. They've been close friends ever since and co-starred in Huff decades later.
His brother Adam is New York magazine's senior restaurant critic, a James Beard Award winner. The Platt family dinner table is the one place where his opinions probably don't get the last word.