Luke Pasqualino

A Peterborough childhood

Luca Giuseppe Pasqualino was born in Peterborough on 19 February 1990, the son of Italian parents whose families came from Sicily and Naples. His father ran a chain of hair salons, and the household was the kind of second-generation Italian family that has been part of the city's fabric since the post-war years, when Peterborough's brickyards and engineering works drew workers from across southern Europe.

He went to Walton Community School in Walton, a couple of miles north-west of the city centre, and it was there that acting stopped being a hobby and started to look like a direction. He joined the school drama club, took weekly workshops around the city, and appeared in local productions. There was no stage school and no family connection to the industry. What there was, by his own account, was a lot of turning up.

Cast at eighteen

In 2008 Pasqualino was cast in the third series of Skins, E4's raw, much-argued-about drama about a group of Bristol sixth-formers. The show made a habit of replacing its entire cast every two series and hiring unknowns to do it, and he arrived as one of the new intake, playing Freddie McClair across the 2009 and 2010 runs.

Freddie was the quiet centre of a loud ensemble: a skater, a stoner, the reluctant romantic lead in a storyline that ended about as bleakly as British teen television has ever managed. The part made him properly famous, very fast, and it also did the thing a good first role should do, which is prove he could hold a scene without raising his voice.

Smaller television work followed in the same period, including guest appearances in Casualty and Miranda, alongside a leading role in the low-budget football film Stingers Rule!

Widening the range

The years after Skins were spent deliberately not repeating it. He took a role in the Warner Bros. supernatural horror The Apparition, shot in 2010 and released in 2012, and appeared as the servant Paolo in the second series of the historical drama The Borgias.

Then came the biggest swing of that stretch. In late 2011 he won the lead in Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, playing the young William Adama, a character already loved by a substantial science-fiction audience in his older incarnation. The project was released first as a ten-part online series in 2012 and then as a television film on Syfy in 2013.

He also appeared in the romantic comedy Love Bite, the French crime series Jo, and Bong Joon-ho's dystopian thriller Snowpiercer, set aboard a train circling a frozen earth.

D'Artagnan and a breakthrough

From 2014 to 2016 Pasqualino led the BBC's The Musketeers as d'Artagnan, the farm boy who talks his way into the king's guard. It was a Sunday-night production with horses, swordfights and a substantial European audience, and it ran for three series.

In June 2015, midway through that run, he won The Times Breakthrough Award at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards, beating ten other nominees. It is the only category at those awards decided by public vote, which makes it a slightly different sort of prize from the rest: less a verdict from the industry than from the people watching. Previous winners have included Billie Piper and the director Amma Asante.

Our Girl and Snatch

When The Musketeers ended he moved straight into BBC One's army drama Our Girl as Captain Elvis Harte, a Special Reconnaissance Regiment soldier and the show's long-running romantic thread. He joined the main cast for the second series in 2016, appeared in four episodes of the third when filming clashed with other work, and returned as a guest for the fourth and final series in 2020.

The clash was Snatch, Crackle's television spin on Guy Ritchie's 2000 film, in which he led as Albert Hill opposite Rupert Grint, Lucien Laviscount and Phoebe Dynevor across two series from 2017 to 2018.

Onto the stage

In February 2019 he made his professional stage debut at the Donmar Warehouse in London, in Joel Horwood's adaptation of Peter Strickland's film Berberian Sound Studio. He played Santini, a coercive Italian horror director, in a production built around live foley work and the sounds of a 1970s sound studio. It ran until March and was generally well received.

Where he is now

Since then the work has spread across streaming and film. He played the Fabrikator David Kostyk in Netflix's fantasy series Shadow and Bone from 2021, guested in the tenth series of Death in Paradise, and appeared in Thomas Hardiman's single-take hairdressing murder mystery Medusa Deluxe.

In 2024 he had a recurring role as Basil "Bas" Baddingham in the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper's Rivals, the half-brother of David Tennant's Tony and the owner of the local bar. The series was widely praised and renewed within weeks. The same year he voiced Wulf, the Dunlending lord driving the plot, in the animated feature The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.

In 2026 he joined the second series of the Apple TV thriller Criminal Record, alongside Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo, which ran weekly from April to June. Recent credits list him under his birth name, Luca Pasqualino.

Selected screen work

• 2009Stingers Rule!Film. Anthony.
• 2009–10SkinsE4. Freddie McClair.
• 2011The BorgiasShowtime. Paolo.
• 2012The ApparitionFilm. Warner Bros.
• 2012Love BiteFilm.
• 2012–13Battlestar Galactica: Blood & ChromeMachinima, then Syfy. William Adama.
• 2013SnowpiercerFilm, dir. Bong Joon-ho.
• 2013JoFrench television series.
• 2014–16The MusketeersBBC One. D'Artagnan.
• 2016–20Our GirlBBC One. Elvis Harte.
• 2017–18SnatchCrackle. Albert Hill.
• 2019Berberian Sound StudioDonmar Warehouse. Stage debut.
• 2021Shadow and BoneNetflix. David Kostyk.
• 2021Death in ParadiseBBC One. Ed Lancer.
• 2022Medusa DeluxeFilm.
• 2024RivalsDisney+. Basil Baddingham.
• 2024The Lord of the Rings: The War of the RohirrimFilm. Voice of Wulf.
• 2026Criminal RecordApple TV. Series two.

Follow the trail

There is no plaque and no tour, but the shape of a Peterborough childhood in the 1990s and 2000s is still legible across the city, and the places that put an eighteen-year-old on national television are mostly still doing it.