Matt Adler is an American actor best known for supporting roles in 1980s teen films such as Teen Wolf, White Water Summer, and Dream a Little Dream. Since the late 1990s, he has built a second career doing additional dialogue recording (ADR) and voice work for major animated films.
Who Is Matt Adler
Matthew D. Adler was born on December 8, 1966, in Los Angeles, California. He began working as a child and teen actor in the mid 1980s and appeared in several television movies and features aimed at younger audiences before shifting toward voice work later in his career.
Adler is not a household name the way some of his 1980s peers became, but his filmography spans four decades. That range, from on-camera teen drama to ADR loop group work on modern animated blockbusters, makes him a useful case study in how a working actor’s career can change shape over time.
Search interest in Adler tends to come from three different directions: fans revisiting 1980s teen movies, anime and animation viewers checking dub credits, and people trying to sort out which actor named Adler appeared in a given project. This article covers all three angles with facts drawn from his documented filmography.
Early Life and the Road to Acting
Adler grew up in Los Angeles and has one brother. As a teenager, he struggled with alcohol and drug use, and he has said he got sober at 17. He later trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute, the acting school built around the method-acting techniques associated with Lee Strasberg.
That early sobriety and formal training set the stage for a run of film and television roles that started while Adler was still a teenager himself, a detail that lines up with the kinds of parts he was cast in during the mid 1980s.
Breakout Roles in the 1980s
Adler’s screen career opened with the 1984 TV movie Shattered Vows, where he played a character named Pat. The following year, he appeared in an episode of Trapper John, M.D., and landed the role that many fans still recognize him for today.
1. Teen Wolf and Lewis
In 1985, Adler played Lewis in Teen Wolf, the Michael J. Fox comedy about a high schooler who discovers he comes from a family of werewolves. Lewis is Scott Howard’s best friend, the character who reacts to the transformation and tries to help Scott manage his new reputation. The film became a modest hit and has kept a following through home video and streaming reissues, which has kept Adler’s name attached to it long after release.
2. North Shore and Dream a Little Dream
Adler starred in North Shore (1987), playing a Midwestern surfer named Rick Kane who travels to Oahu’s North Shore to compete against the sport’s best. He also had a role in White Water Summer (1987), an outdoor adventure film, and appeared in Dream a Little Dream (1989), a body-swap comedy that also featured Corey Feldman and Corey Haim.
Across these films, Adler’s parts fit a pattern common to the era: young, athletic, and often paired against a more famous co-star. That pattern is part of why his name shows up in retrospectives about 1980s teen cinema even when he was not the top-billed lead.
He also appeared in Flight of the Navigator (1986), playing a character named Jeff in the Disney science fiction film about a boy who returns from a mysterious eight-year disappearance unaged. A year later, he took a smaller, comedic role in the anthology film Amazon Women on the Moon, playing George in the “Titan Man” segment, one of several short, self-contained sketches that made up that movie.
Additional Film and Television Work
Beyond his best-known teen roles, Adler took smaller television parts that filled out his 1980s resume. He played Pete Mills in the 1986 TV short Carly Mills, and he appeared in the 1999 TV movie Kilroy as a character billed simply as Bar Guy.
These are not the credits that define an actor’s public image, but they show a working performer picking up available jobs in television movies and short-form projects during a period when teen film roles were not always steady. That mix of headline parts and smaller television work is common for actors who came up in the same era as Adler and did not become breakout stars.
The Almost Role: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
One of the more specific facts about Adler’s career is that in 1986 he auditioned for the role of Bill S. Preston, Esquire, in what became Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He was reportedly one of the final candidates for the part, alongside Keanu Reeves, Donovan Leitch, and Gary Riley.
The role of Bill ultimately went to Alex Winter, who had originally auditioned for the other lead, Ted “Theodore” Logan. That casting swap is a well-documented piece of the film’s production history, and Adler’s near miss is one of the more concrete details available about his mid-1980s career.
Marriages and Personal Life
Adler was married to actress Ria Pavia from 1993 until their divorce in 1995. In 2000, he married actress Laura San Giacomo, known for her roles in Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the sitcom Just Shoot Me. The two have remained married for more than two decades.
Adler has largely kept his personal life out of the entertainment press, which is part of why detailed public information about his life outside of his credits is limited compared with actors who worked more consistently in front of the camera.
San Giacomo’s own career, built around Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pretty Woman, and Just Shoot Me, has kept her a more visible public figure than her husband. That difference in visibility is part of the reason searches for Adler often surface information framed around his marriage rather than his own credits.
A Second Act in Voice Acting and ADR
Starting in the late 1990s, Adler moved into voice work, first through additional dialogue recording and loop group work, then through credited voice roles in animated films. ADR work involves re-recording or adding dialogue after filming, including background voices, Walla, and dubbed lines for foreign-language films brought to English-speaking audiences.
1. Anime Dubbing Credits
Adler contributed additional voices to the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro for its 2005 Disney re-release, and he later worked on the English dub of The Wind Rises (2013). He also did voice work on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and on the video game Street Fighter Alpha, along with the anime series Gate Keepers.
These credits place him among the pool of Los Angeles based actors who regularly work on English localizations of Japanese animation, a niche but steady corner of the voice industry that rarely puts a performer’s name in a marketing campaign but keeps working actors employed year after year.
2. Animated Feature Films
On the studio animation side, Adler did additional voice work on Dinosaur (2000), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Monsters vs. Aliens (2009), and Epic (2013). Most of these credits fall under general or additional voices rather than named characters, which is typical of loop group and ADR work on large animated productions with big ensemble casts.
That kind of credit rarely draws individual attention, but it represents a large share of the actual paid work available in voice acting. Adler’s steady presence on these productions across more than a decade suggests a working relationship with casting directors and ADR supervisors built on reliability rather than star power.
A Common Case of Mistaken Identity
Adler shares a surname with two other American actors, Charlie Adler and Max Adler, and that overlap regularly causes confusion online. Charlie Adler, born in 1956, is a veteran voice director best known for playing Buster Bunny on Tiny Toon Adventures and Ickis on Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. Max Adler, born in 1986, is best known for playing Dave Karofsky on the television series Glee.
None of the three men are related, and their careers barely overlap in genre or era. Readers searching for information on one Adler sometimes land on biography pages about another, which is worth flagging for anyone trying to confirm which Adler appeared in a specific project or interview.
Checking birth year, notable roles, and the specific project in question is the fastest way to tell the three apart. Charlie Adler’s directing and voice credits run mostly through animated television from the 1990s onward, Max Adler’s work is concentrated in live-action television from the 2010s, and Matt Adler’s credits split between 1980s teen film and post-2000 animation and dubbing.
Where Matt Adler Fits in Hollywood History
Matt Adler’s career does not follow the arc of a star who peaked once and then faded. Instead, it traces a shift that has become common in the industry: a young actor cast in visible teen roles during the 1980s who later found sustained, if less publicly visible, work behind a microphone.
His filmography connects two distinct chapters of American film history. The first is the teen movie boom of the mid to late 1980s, when studios cast young, relatively unknown actors like Adler alongside bigger names such as Michael J. Fox and Corey Feldman. The second is the rise of large-scale computer animation and English-language anime dubbing from the late 1990s onward, an industry that needed a steady supply of trained voice actors far beyond its handful of celebrity leads.
For casting directors, ADR supervisors, and fans piecing together who worked on a particular film, Adler’s credits offer a useful thread connecting Teen Wolf era Hollywood to the animated blockbusters of the 2000s and 2010s.
His near miss on Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure also shows how much casting comes down to timing and studio preference rather than talent alone. Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and Adler were all considered for the same role, and only one outcome became a career-defining part for the actor who landed it. The other candidates, Adler included, moved on to different kinds of steady work in the decades that followed.
