Matt Lauer
Matt Lauer is an actor, born 1957.
Twenty-three years on the same program turns a face into furniture. Lauer, born in New York in 1957, came up through local news at WNBC in the city, joined Today as its news anchor in 1994, moved into the host's chair in 1997, and stayed there until 2017. Attached to that run: frequent contributions to Dateline, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade every November, and the opening ceremonies of several Olympic Games. Today took Daytime Emmys for outstanding morning program along the way.
That ubiquity is what almost every entry in his screen credits is actually about. He is not acting so much as being deployed. Land of the Lost, The Beaver, two Sharknado films, Up All Night, The Michael J. Fox Show: in each of them Matt Lauer plays Matt Lauer, and the casting is a shorthand rather than a performance. Putting a morning anchor on screen tells the audience, in three seconds and with no dialogue required, that the events of the fiction have become national news. It is a device, and for two decades he was the most convenient version of it.
There are a couple of exceptions, both voice parts: Hark Hanson in Curious George 2 and a sea serpent in an animated Elf special. The two most recent entries here are archive footage, old Today segments repurposed as source material in documentaries about other people's scandals.
Movies (13)
- Land of the Lost (2009)
- Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey! (2009)
- 9/11 (2017)
- The Beaver (2011)
- Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015)
- Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)
- Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom (2026)
- The Craigslist Killer (2011)
- Justin Bieber's Believe (2013)
- Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas (2014)
- Drew Peterson: Untouchable (2014)
- Who Is Clark Rockefeller? (2010)
- Shelter from the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast (2005)
TV (6)
Where to start with Matt Lauer
Only one of these cameos carries any dramatic weight, and that is The Beaver, where the appearance serves the film instead of winking at the camera. It is the rare case of the device earning its place.
Land of the Lost is the most enjoyable use of the joke, since the comedy depends on a straight-faced news presence colliding with something ridiculous. Sharknado 2: The Second One takes the same gag and runs it with no restraint at all, which is the entire appeal of that series.
The sitcom appearances, Up All Night and The Michael J. Fox Show, are the smallest and most disposable. For the actual work rather than the cameos, Dateline is the long-running newsmagazine he contributed to for years, and it is a better record of what he did for a living than any of the fiction.