Matt Lanter is an actor more people have heard than seen. For twelve years he gave Anakin Skywalker a lighter, more likeable voice than Hayden Christensen ever found, and his live-action career has been variations on the same charming young man.
Fi1m perspective
In Dave Filoni's Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), Anakin Skywalker arrives with a new voice, and the surprise is that it is a pleasant one. Lanter plays him quick, dry and a little pleased with himself, a young general who enjoys the job. Hayden Christensen never found that lightness in the live-action films, and we liked this Anakin more than we expected to, which is an odd thing to feel about a man we are supposed to be watching for signs of trouble. The film around him is a television pilot with a cinema release and we gave it 44, but the voice was not the problem.
The problem was the writing. Ashley Eckstein's Ahsoka calls him Skyguy, he calls her Snips, and the script goes back to the exchange every eight minutes. Lanter has nothing to play but a quarrel, and he plays it well enough that you can hear what a better scene might have sounded like. He got those scenes eventually: the series ran from 2008 to 2020 and he voiced Anakin throughout, which is longer than any live actor has held the part. He has said he did not know he was auditioning for Anakin Skywalker. Whoever cast him knew.
On camera he has been a working television actor since Point Pleasant (2005) and Commander in Chief (2005 to 2006). 90210 (2009 to 2013) made him Liam Court, the brooding one; Timeless (2016 to 2018) made him Wyatt Logan, the soldier in a time-travel procedural; Jupiter's Legacy (2021) put him in a cape as George Hutchence. He also turned up in The Mandalorian (2019) in a small part, so that for one episode his face was in the same universe as his voice. We have not reviewed these, and the pattern is plain from the credits alone: producers look at him and see the confident young man, and he gives them the confident young man.
The low points are Disaster Movie (2008) and Vampires Suck (2010), parody films that were received about as well as their titles deserve. Nobody comes out of those well, and it would be unfair to hold them against a performer who was a hired face in them.
What he has, then, is one large thing and a lot of competent smaller ones. The large thing is a voice that made a famously difficult character bearable for a generation of children, and it will outlast everything else on the list. That is not the worst fate for an actor. It is a strange one, to be best known for the words coming out of a drawn face, and Lanter seems to have made his peace with it.
Biography
Matt Lanter is an American actor and model. He voiced Anakin Skywalker in the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the subsequent television series of the same name.
Lanter gained prominence playing Liam Court in the CW series 90210 (2009–2013). He has appeared in films including Vampires Suck (2010) and Pitch Perfect 3 (2017), and starred as Wyatt Logan in the NBC series Timeless (2016–2018). Other television credits include Grey's Anatomy and Heroes.
