Arnas Fedaravicius

Arnas Fedaravicius is a Lithuanian actor whose distinctive features, athletic physicality and quiet intensity have carried him from a tough working life on the streets of Vilnius to some of the most-watched prestige television of the past decade. Born on 21 June 1991 in Vilnius, the capital of a Lithuania that had only recently reclaimed its independence, he grew up in a country still finding its post-Soviet feet, a generational backdrop that arguably gave him both the multilingualism and the resilience that have defined his career. He is fluent in Lithuanian, English and Russian, with passable Italian, a linguistic toolkit that has opened doors across European productions and given him an unusually flexible accent ear.

His mother is a former Miss Lithuania, and although Fedaravicius rarely trades on the connection, that early exposure to the world of public-facing performance seems to have nudged him toward an artistic life. He enrolled at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2012, but his education there was short-lived. Within a year he had been cast in his first major film role and the practical demands of a working set quickly took precedence over the classroom. The opportunity that pulled him out came from Italian director Gabriele Salvatores, who cast him as Kolyma in the 2013 crime drama Deadly Code, also released internationally as Siberian Education. The film, an adaptation of Nicolai Lilin's controversial memoir, threw the young actor into an English-language ensemble alongside John Malkovich and a cast of seasoned European performers. Fedaravicius has since spoken about the surreal nature of that first job, recalling that he was working as a flyer distributor on the streets of Vilnius, handing out leaflets for spare cash, when his agent rang to confirm the part.

The years immediately after that debut were leaner than the headline credit might suggest. He took small roles in independent features such as Chasing Solace in 2015 and Access All Areas in 2017, supplemented by jobs that included amateur boxing and various forms of casual labour. The boxing in particular would prove unexpectedly useful: when his profile rose, casting directors began to notice an actor who could handle stage combat and stunt work without a double. He pursued formal stunt training around this time, a decision that sharpened his marketability for the kind of physically demanding genre work that was about to come his way.

His real breakthrough arrived through Scandinavian television, where he was cast as Andrus in the second season of the SVT and HBO Europe drama Tjockare an vatten, released to English-speaking audiences as Thicker Than Water, in 2016. The role gave him a chance to play complicated, morally shaded material in a long-form format, and it placed him on the radar of British casting agents at exactly the right moment. In 2017 he joined the cast of The Last Kingdom, the BBC and Netflix adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories novels, as the loyal Dane-born warrior Sihtric. What was originally a supporting part grew steadily across the show's run, and by the time the series concluded in 2022 Sihtric had become one of the most beloved members of Uhtred's hearth-troop, a quietly watchful figure whose loyalty was the emotional spine of several major storylines. Fedaravicius appeared in 38 episodes across five seasons and reprised the role in the 2023 feature-length finale Seven Kings Must Die, performing much of his own swordwork and horseback combat thanks to that earlier stunt training.

The visibility from The Last Kingdom unlocked a steady run of prestige projects. In 2023 he appeared in the second season of Amazon Prime Video's The Wheel of Time as Masema Dagar, a fanatical Aielman zealot, in a four-episode arc that drew strong reviews from fans of Robert Jordan's source novels. The same year he turned up in the British detective drama Shetland as Lukas Nowak, again across a small but pivotal stretch of episodes. He has also lent his voice and likeness to video-game work, including Creative Assembly's Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia and Total War: Warhammer III, capitalising on the audience he had built through historical television.

The biggest transition of his career to date came in 2025, when Mike White cast him as Valentin in the third season of HBO's The White Lotus. The role, a flirtatious Russian yoga instructor stranded at a Thai resort and unable to return home in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, was a deliberate pivot away from the leather and chainmail of his earlier work. Filming in Thailand alongside Lisa from Blackpink, Tayme Thapthimthong, Natasha Rothwell and the rest of White's deliberately starry ensemble, Fedaravicius slipped, as one critic put it, out of his Viking garb and into modern athleisure with disarming ease. The performance widened his audience considerably and confirmed that he could carry a contemporary leading-man register as comfortably as he could a tenth-century shield-wall.

Off screen, Fedaravicius is known for an unusual physical trait that audiences often spot in close-ups: he has heterochromia iridum, with one eye gray-green and the other hazel-brown, a feature that lends his work an unforced sense of strangeness and which directors and cinematographers have repeatedly used to good effect, particularly in the close shield-wall reaction shots that became something of a Sihtric signature. Since around 2023 he has been in a relationship with the American actress Emeraude Toubia, who reportedly visited him during the Thailand shoot for The White Lotus. He maintains a fairly private public profile, gives few extended interviews and tends to direct conversation back toward his collaborators and toward the practical craft of physical performance, an attitude that fits the unshowy, watchful, listening quality of his best work on screen. With a credible foothold now in both prestige genre television and contemporary character drama, and with a working knowledge of several major European languages, he looks well placed to keep crossing borders, both literal and generic, for some time to come.