ACT NATURALLY –
Nov. 19, 2025 – When Lithuanian actor Arūnas Sakalauskas looks back on his childhood, alcohol was always present, but never in a good way. His father drank heavily, and as a boy he learned to associate alcohol with shouting, shame and loss. “I promised myself I would never be like my father,” he recalls. For years, he kept that promise.
But in Lithuania, as in much of Europe, alcohol was everywhere. In small towns, not drinking alcohol was what made you stand out. “If you didn’t drink, you were the strange one,” he remembers. Like many young people growing up in an environment where drinking is part of social life, Arūnas learned early that refusing an alcoholic beverage could make you an outsider.
In his early thirties, his marriage ended, and the world he had built collapsed. “My friends told me to have a drink, that it would help with the pain,” he says. “And I thought it did for a while.” But what seemed like an easy coping mechanism soon revealed itself to be a pattern. “When I started drinking, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.”
