When Charles did “The Foodroom” sketch with Schumer last spring, it seemed as though _Babysitter’_s Bryan had grown up, gotten serious about his future in fast food, and we were just checking back in.Īnd that incurable romantic thing? Maybe that was really him all along, too. When Charles showed up a while back on **Keith Olbermann’**s ESPN show, reprising _Sports Night’_s Dan Rydell for a night, it kind of felt like Dan Rydell had been hanging out all along in a parallel universe and just popped back over, a little older, a little more grizzled, to say hey. Maybe it’s a feeling he’s even deliberately cultivated. That was the thing about Josh Charles: Unlike the others-the unknowable River Phoenixes, Jared Letos, and Brad Pitts-Josh Charles seemed real, and those characters he played, they seemed real too. Coincidence? I think not!) But back in 1989, odds seemed at least decent that one day Josh Charles and I might cross paths, and that, when we did, it was more than likely that he would be really cool and funny and nice, and might even proclaim his love for me over the loudspeaker of his truck, or show up at my school wearing a toggle coat and perhaps bearing some flowers. (It’s worth noting that I, too, am in a serious relationship with a man who, when he caught me brushing up on Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, casually mentioned that he’d always heard he looked like the delivery guy. These days, Charles is married to former ballerina and Bunheads author Sophie Flack, with whom he has a baby boy. But, if I’m honest, the real appeal of Charles, at least in the nineties, lay not in the magic of his physiognomy it was in my own prepubescent sense that maybe, in a world not too dissimilar from our own, someone like Josh Charles, or maybe Josh Charles himself, might fall for someone like me. Examining his face, though, I realize I’m equally a fan of his mobile, expressive eyebrows, often drawn together into a look that can turn on a hair from cocky, quizzical skepticism to puppy dog–hang face. It’s true: His Cupid’s bow mouth, blessed with uncommonly rosy lips, is partially agape for practically the whole movie, and it adds to Knox’s considerable charm. But then, when Knox shows up at Chris’s school to deliver a limp apology bouquet of wildflowers, then publicly humiliates her by reciting aloud a poem he wrote in her honor (“The heavens made a girl named Chris / with hair and skin of gold”), her heart comes to its senses and begins to melt. Chris at first rebuffs Knox’s advances, but not without sending some mixed signals: She invites him to a party at the Danbury’s house only to wake up from a mid-evening power nap to find Knox lovingly caressing her forehead. Keating’s imperative to carpe diem finds its natural interpretation in a rabid, no-holds-barred pursuit of the unavailable girl Chris, of course, is so pretty that she’s already taken-by her school’s star football player/meathead, Chet Danbury. My affections lay, of course, with Charles’s floppy-haired, baby-faced Knox, sidekick material at best until he steals the show by falling hard for a blonde public school cheerleader named Chris. Josh Charles Dead Poets Society Photo: Courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures Toward the end of the decade, I even loved him all grown up, playing the fast-talking, fiercely loyal, fratty sportscaster Dan Rydell on the short-lived (1998 to 2000, RIP), critically acclaimed Aaron Sorkin sitcom, Sports Night. Then there was sensitive, gay-but-a-touch-hetero-flexible, French cinema–loving Eddy in 1994’s Threesome, also known as the most nineties movie/cuddlefest that has ever been made. There was Bryan, the oceanology-obsessed, tenderhearted Clown Dog delivery boy who rocks a soda jerk hat and falls for **Christina Applegate’**s college-agnostic fashionista Sue Ellen in the 1991 cult hit (and box-office flop) Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Of course, his attractiveness is inextricably tied to the characters he inhabited on-screen in the nineties and just before, incurable romantics so good-humored, goofily enduring, and true that this writer has never been able to leave them completely behind. Stephen Baldwin, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Josh Charles Threesome Photo: Everett Collection
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