Facundo Arana

Line D of the Buenos Aires subway, the platform at Pueyrredón station. A six-foot-one blond guy spends hours playing the saxophone with his case open to collect coins.

At seventeen, his body gave him the first serious warning in the form of Hodgkin lymphoma. That lymphatic cancer forced him to spend almost a year shut away between chemotherapy sessions and medical checkups that stretched on for nearly five years. So when director Lito Espinosa spotted that street musician in the corridors of the Buenos Aires subway, Facundo Arana already knew all too well what it meant to fight for every breath of air.

Espinosa cast him in Canto rodado in 1993. After that first break came episodic appearances in daily soap operas and telenovelas from the Telefe studios, where he learned by heart the frenetic pace of studio shoots.

And television didn't take long to devour him.

The Heartthrob Who Broke Ratings in the East

In 1998, Muñeca brava arrived with Natalia Oreiro. The romantic comedy not only swept Argentina, it was sold to more than eighty countries with massive audience figures across Eastern Europe, Russia, and Israel. Crowds at Moscow airports swarmed to see the fair-eyed young man who played Ivo Di Carlo.

But the actor refused to settle into the pose of the harmless heartthrob. In 2004, he headlined Padre Coraje for the production company Pol-ka, a period drama set in the 1950s in which he played a vigilante disguised as a Catholic priest. The series swept the Martín Fierro Awards, taking home the golden statuette, with peaks that nearly reached thirty ratings points.

Two years later, he reunited with Oreiro in Sos mi vida. The chemistry between the two once again led the nights of Argentine commercial television with no serious competition from direct rivals.

Everyone wanted his face on screen.

From Social Mud to the Suffocation of Everest

In 2008, he broke the mold of classic melodrama by starring in Vidas robadas. The storyline tackled human trafficking and forced prostitution rings in Argentina, with a script closely supervised by activist Susana Trimarco. The production received a Senate recognition and changed the way commercial fiction handled federal crimes on free-to-air television.

Because real adrenaline never existed inside a recording studio. Arana devoted much of his free time to high-altitude mountaineering, and in 2012 he attempted to summit Mount Everest, an expedition that ended in an emergency hospital stay in Kathmandu due to severe pulmonary and cerebral edema at thousands of meters above sea level. It took him four years to return to the mountain, but in May 2016 he reached the summit via the north face.

He balanced those expeditions with his passion for instruments. He formed the band The Blue Light Orquesta to tour venues playing blues and jazz covers, recording studio works such as Salir a tocar in 2014 and En el aire in 2016.

The Corrientes Stages as a Permanent Refuge

Text-based theater became his lifeline against the wear and tear of the small screen. In 2005, he made his debut on Corrientes Avenue in Visitando al Sr. Green alongside veteran Pepe Soriano, earning the ACE Award for Revelation. Years later, he staged the one-man show En el aire, a production written by Manuel González Gil in which he played multiple characters while performing saxophone pieces live.

That same one-man show toured venues across Argentina and theaters in Spain for more than a decade. Between 2022 and 2023, he starred in Los 39 escalones in Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, with the precise rhythm of British comedy. In 2025, he traveled to Peru to shoot the feature film Soltera, casada, viuda, divorciada 2 under director Ani Alva Helfer.

The long television shooting schedules were behind him.

In September 2026, he returned to the Multiteatro in Buenos Aires to revive Visitando al Sr. Green, once again playing Ross Gardiner alongside Jorge Suárez under the direction of Santiago Doria. The production set a fixed schedule of five performances a week, Wednesday through Sunday at the venue on Corrientes Avenue, with a technical capacity limited to seven hundred and sixty seats per show.