Oliver Platt

Oliver Platt was born on January 12, 1960, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, to American parents Nicholas Platt, a career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Zambia, and the Philippines, and Sheila Maynard, a clinical social worker. The family returned to the United States when Platt was three months old. His older brother, Adam Platt, became a restaurant critic for New York magazine. Platt's ancestry includes paternal great-grandfather Charles A. Platt, an artist and architect, and paternal great-great-grandfather Joseph Hodges Choate, a diplomat and lawyer who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President William McKinley. On his mother's side, Platt descends from equestrian Arthur Scott Burden and socialite Cynthia Roche, and is a great-great-grandson of General Robert Shaw Oliver. Choate's brother, William Gardner Choate, a lawyer and federal judge, founded Choate Rosemary Hall.

Because Nicholas Platt's foreign service career required frequent relocation, Platt attended twelve different schools during his childhood, including the American School in Japan, and spent much of his early years in Asia and Washington, D.C. He has credited drama departments with providing stability during those years, describing participation in theater as a survival mechanism that gave him a subculture to connect with wherever he lived. A visit to the Kennedy Center at age nine, where he watched a young Morgan Freeman deliver a lengthy monologue before a curtain rose, helped inspire his pursuit of acting. Platt later attended Colorado Rocky Mountain School, a progressive boarding school in Carbondale, Colorado, before majoring in drama at Tufts University, where he became close friends with actor Hank Azaria. He subsequently spent three years working in theater in Boston, Massachusetts, which he described as providing some of the best training of his career. He then toured schools with Shakespeare and Company, based in Lenox, Massachusetts, earning his Equity card before relocating to New York.

In New York, Platt built his early stage career through Off-Broadway and regional theater, performing with the New York Shakespeare Festival, Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and other companies. While working at Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, he obtained an agent and met actor Bill Murray at a cousin's Christmas party. Murray attended one of Platt's performances and recommended him to director Jonathan Demme, who cast him in the 1988 film Married to the Mob, marking his screen debut. That same year he appeared in Working Girl, and he went on to accumulate a substantial film résumé that included Flatliners (1990), Beethoven (1992), Indecent Proposal, Benny & Joon, and The Three Musketeers (all 1993), A Time to Kill (1996), and Bulworth (1998). In 1998, Platt and Stanley Tucci starred together in The Impostors, playing two deadbeat actors who improvise with unsuspecting strangers; the two had developed the characters while working on a play at Yale University in 1988, with Tucci later writing the screenplay and directing the film. Additional film credits from that period include Dr. Dolittle (1998), Lake Placid, Three to Tango, and Bicentennial Man (all 1999), followed by Gun Shy, Ready to Rumble (both 2000), Don't Say a Word (2001), Pieces of April (2003), Kinsey (2004), The Ice Harvest, Casanova (both 2005), Frost/Nixon (2008), Year One, 2012 (both 2009), Please Give, Love & Other Drugs (both 2010), and X-Men: First Class (2011).

On television, Platt received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor for his portrayal of White House Counsel Oliver Babish in The West Wing (2001), a character brought in during the second season to build a defense for President Bartlet following the non-disclosure of his multiple sclerosis. His recurring role as Russell Tupper in Huff from 2004 to 2006 earned him two additional Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination. He received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for his portrayal of George Steinbrenner in the ESPN miniseries The Bronx Is Burning (2007), and further Emmy nominations for guest roles in Nip/Tuck (2008). Platt starred in The Big C from 2010 to 2013 and appeared in Fargo (2014) and The Good Wife (2015). He has played Dr. Daniel Charles on Chicago Med since 2015 and portrays Uncle Jimmy in the Hulu series The Bear, a role he has held since 2022.

Platt made his Broadway debut in 2006 in Shining City, a play by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play. He returned to Broadway in 2009, playing Nathan Detroit in the revival of Frank Loesser's musical Guys and Dolls. Across his career, Platt has received five Primetime Emmy nominations, a Golden Globe Award nomination, two Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, and one Tony Award nomination.