Vanessa Lachey’s path from childhood to her role in the “NCIS” franchise first reached celebrity status when she won Miss Teen USA in 1998. From there, she balanced her initial batch of minor acting roles with what was, for a time, her more prominent professional job — hosting. She spent a few years anchoring various MTV shows before landing a correspondent and sometimes guest host gig on “Entertainment Tonight” between 2005 and 2024. Of course, most people associate her these days with the Netflix dating show “Love is Blind,” which she fronts with husband Nick Lachey. 

As for acting, her most famous role is Jane Tennant, a main character on “NCIS: Hawai’i,” which she has also played in a recurring capacity on OG “NCIS,” plus an episode of “NCIS: Los Angeles.” She’s only done a handful of movies, but her film debut was a big one — 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.” Unfortunately, that film joined the ranks of Marvel movies that bombed at the box office, thus sealing the fate of that particular iteration of the “Fantastic Four” film franchise (not that any of the subsequent attempts have been wildly successful either, but that’s another discussion). 

In “Rise of the Silver Surfer,” Lachey plays Johnny Storm’s (Chris Evans) unnamed date, who accompanies him to the wedding of his sister Sue (Jessica Alba) to her fiancé, Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd). As Johnny is basking in all the media attention for his arrival at the ceremony, a reporter askes Lachey’s character what it’s like to date the Human Torch. Lachey delivers the hilarious response, “Fireproof lingerie … and a lot of aloe.” 

As far as small roles in Marvel movies go, that’s definitely an amusing one for Lachey to lay claim to. For his part, Evans loves his “Fantastic Four” movies, as does his co-star Michael Chiklis, who played Ben Grimm/The Thing. Some definitely felt that the humor was too big of a focus, and overpowered any attempts the movies tried to make towards being darker or more complex than shallow popcorn superhero fare. Either way, they are a fun relic of their time, and “Rise of the Silver Surfer” arguably remains Lachey’s best movie role to date.