And at this moment of great clarity – experienced at a British Council film screening in Nigeria where he was working as a trainee architect – Anton Lesser (BA Hons Architecture 1973) decided he was to be an actor.
Decades later the emotion still wells in his eyes as he recalls his epiphany. “I get shivers just talking about it to you now,” he says. “To cut a long story short, I quit my job and I wrote to all the drama schools. RADA was the only one still auditioning at that time. I came back, auditioned, got in and my first job was at Stratford.”
He has barely stopped working since in a career which has included countless Shakespearean roles, radio plays and film and television parts ranging from Pirates of the Caribbean to Midsomer Murders. These days he’s most recognised for playing Thomas More in the BAFTA award-winning Wolf Hall, and, of course, as sinister scheming survivor Qyburn in HBO’s globe-straddling TV behemoth Game of Thrones.
Birmingham-born Anton found himself in Nigeria – vulnerable, timid and, by his own admission, hopelessly out of his depth as the head of a team building a large hotel – via a degree from the University of Liverpool in architecture. While a career in architecture was not to be, he credits his time at Liverpool for much more than his degree.
“I think it was absolutely fundamental to me being open enough and having a liberal, informed, intelligent environment within which to ripen,” he says. “Architecture is a very broad discipline. It’s about human beings in relation to their environment and to other people in those environments. I think it was completely invaluable.”
He had wanted to be an architect since childhood and was accepted on the highly regarded Liverpool course where he says he was a good student but not always completely dedicated to his studies.
The signs were there that acting could play a big role in his future. He joined the dramatic society where he made most of his friends – including his best friend to this day. “It’s so funny because I was just acting for fun but it was obviously satisfying some real need which hadn’t quite made itself felt,” he says.
After graduating it was Voluntary Service Overseas that took him to Nigeria for his year out. He was nine months into his stay when he attended the British Council event for volunteers that changed the path of his life. The film being screened was about Stratford-upon-Avon and the Royal Shakespeare Company and in less than three years he was working for that very company.
The career ‘chosen’ for him has been littered with highlights but not without its difficulties too, not least a recent problem with his voice. “It kept seizing up,” he says. “I had these symptoms of not being able to produce my voice and that’s very, very frightening because it’s my livelihood. Happily it’s proved not to be life threatening or anything anyone can give a name to. It was probably psychological or stress-related but it made me face the fragility of what I have at my disposal to earn my living. What I love about my job is – this is it. I don’t have a briefcase. I don’t have any tools. I don’t have anything. I love the simplicity of that and I love the rigour and the discipline and the austerity of finding your way to be the best possible expression of what you think is truthful.
From Wolf Hall to Westeros
But while waiting to be found out the highlights kept coming. Lesser cites doing Hamlet with Jonathan Miller in 1982 at the Donmar Warehouse and working with director Peter Kosminsky on Wolf Hallamong his favourite moments.
“Wolf Hall was probably the piece of work I have most respect for and feel most flattered to have been involved with. There’s a lot of work one does to pay the bills where the writing isn’t that great. But occasionally the writing is wonderful and you think, ‘Oh, I have to rise to this and I have to stretch to be good enough for this’. There’s no complacency.”
Anton’s best-known role as Qyburn on Game of Thrones came at the third time of auditioning in Season 3 just as he was picking up on “a buzz that everybody and his wife is in this series.”
He says: “It can be a bit more detached because it’s such a vast beast. It’s difficult to get that family feel that we do on, say, Endeavour, but it’s great to work on. I love Qyburn’s complexity and I love that fact that you can’t really pigeonhole him. The only thing you can say about him is he’s a survivor.”
But, as any fan of Game of Thrones will know, an actor shouldn’t get settled in for the long haul in Westeros, where characters regularly meet ugly and unexpected ends. That lifetime of actor’s insecurity will stand him in good stead. “I never know what’s going to happen. I haven’t had the phone call to say ‘Anton, I’m really sorry but…’, so it could be any day.”
Watch Anton talk about his time at Liverpool