He was born Matthew Mackendree Lanter on April 1, 1983, in Massillon, OH, to Joseph Lanter and Jana Burson. The family moved to Atlanta, GA when Matt was eight, and he came of age in suburban Gwinnett County, attending Collins Hill High School and becoming an avid athlete, playing golf, football and baseball. His parents divorced his senior year. Graduating high school in 2001, Lanter attended the University of Georgia, majoring in sports business, which dovetailed with his love of baseball into a two-year stint as a batboy for the Atlanta Braves. For a time he mulled over a career in professional sports management, but while still in school, he noticed an open call for attractive would-be models for a reality show. The scouts liked what they saw and he found himself on his way to Los Angeles to become one of several hunks being pared down each week on Bravo’s “Manhunt: The Search for America’s Most Gorgeous Male Model.” He made it to the final 10, but the dog-eat-dog experience soured him on the prospect of modeling. When he got the axe, he responded on the air by suggesting he would rather be an actor anyway. Not improbably, a talent management executive soon called him up.
Lanter remained in L.A. and managed to secure a small role in a biopic about golf great Bobby Jones, then began netting some guest roles on television series such as “8 Simple Rules” (ABC, 2002-05), “Point Pleasant” (Fox, 2005) and “Big Love” (HBO, 2006- ). In 2005, he landed a series regular job on the ABC political drama “Commander In Chief” (2005-06), playing the teen son of the first female president of the U.S. (Geena Davis), but the show only lasted a season. He next picked up the recurring role of a smarmy, pretty-boy quarterback in the first season of NBC’s surprise sci-fi hit “Heroes,” initially charming the central cheerleader, Claire (Hayden Panettiere), but later attempting to rape her and suffering a calamitous fate for it.
Lanter became a hot commodity with a flurry of guest-shots on such popular shows as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” (CBS, 2000- ), “Grey’s Anatomy” (ABC, 2005- ) and “Monk” (USA, 2002-09), as well as playing to his teen heartthrob ethos in a made-for-TV sequel to the skating romance franchise, “The Cutting Edge 3: Chasing the Dream” (The CW, 2008) and the lampoon feature “Disaster Movie” (2008). He also scored what would prove to be regular work in one of entertainment’s most beloved franchises; lending his voice to heroic but star-crossed Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker – well before he went dark – in George Lucas’s animated feature, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” (2008), which served effectively as a pilot for an ongoing animated series about Anakin and other Jedi adventures to be aired on The Cartoon Network.
In early 2009, Lanter also won a recurring role as archetypal teen bad-boy Liam on The CW’s “90210,” and his brawling, cougar-bedding ways went over so well that producers made him a cast regular for the show’s 2009-10 season. Also that fall, he appeared in the B-grade slasher flick “Sorority Row,” playing male eye-candy opposite a group of sorority girls who accidentally kill a fellow sister and abruptly find themselves prey to a serial killer.