10 THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT SHANTEL VANSANTEN
FBI fans haven’t seen the last of Shantel VanSanten — she’ll continue to battle bad guys as Special Agent Nina Chase on the hit CBS crime drama’s spinoff FBI: Most Wanted. Before joining producer Dick Wolf’s TV universe, the model turned actress made her mark on The WB’s One Tree Hill, Apple’s For All Mankind and Amazon’s The Boys. Now she continues her streak as strongwilled Chase. Here are ten things you don’t know about the 38-year-old screen chameleon.
1 She was born in Minnesota but raised in Texas, where she attended Incarnate Word Academy, an all-girls Catholic college prep school.
2 She was a finalist on NBC’s reality TV contest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search — but was eliminated in the series’ first episode.
3 In 2005, she was in the delivery room when her One Tree Hill screen sibling Bethany Joy Lenz gave birth to her first and only child.
4 She still has the camera strap she wore during her first One Tree Hill episode to play shutterbug Quinn James.
5 Some of her favorite recipes to cook from scratch include beef stew, Moroccan chicken with vegetables and an avocado yogurt dipping sauce with sage and lemon.
6 She auditioned for the female lead in 2010’s Dear John because she thought it was the “best movie ever” — but lost out to Amanda Seyfried.
7She’s received multiple marriage proposals from fans.
8 Shantel was the most starstruck after meeting Helen Mirren and recalls, “I just stood there, mouth agape, as though I was a small girl watching a princess walk into a room.”
9 She and estranged husband Victor Webster had each other’s first initials tattooed on their forearms in 2021 — less than two years before the Days of Our Lives hunk filed for divorce!
10 She once sat next to a fellow airplane passenger who was watching her in episodes of The Flash — but the man never connected the dots.