Anton Lesser is the man behind the desk in a good deal of the television we rate: head of news, chief superintendent, Imperial officer. He plays authority as something thought about rather than worn, and he is seldom given enough to do with it.
Fi1m perspective
In The Hour (2011) he plays Clarence Fendley, the head of news, and we wrote at the time that he did more with a raised eyebrow than the script managed with a page. That is the whole of his method in one line. He is rarely given the story. He is given a desk, a title and a few minutes an episode, and he spends them letting us watch a man decide something he will not say aloud. Directors keep handing him this job because nobody does it better.
He came to acting sideways: an architecture degree at Liverpool, then RADA, then straight into the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he played principal roles on stage and in the BBC Television Shakespeare. That is classical training in the plainest sense, and it shows in the voice, which has since done a great deal of work in BBC radio and in audiobooks, Dickens in particular. Television found him steadily from the 1980s and then, in his sixties, all at once: Qyburn in Game of Thrones (2013), Chief Superintendent Bright in Endeavour (2013), Thomas More in Wolf Hall (2015), Harold Macmillan in The Crown (2016), Major Partagaz in Andor (2022).
The parts have a family resemblance. They are clever men inside institutions, usually in period dress or a uniform, and they are seldom simply good or bad. He has said he likes "characters that are very equivocal and difficult to pin down", and that is what he supplies: More is principled and rigid in the same breath, Bright unbuttons by degrees over ten years, Qyburn ran for six seasons on the audience never quite settling what he was.
In Andor he is the Imperial intelligence officer whose job is, more often than not, to explain the situation to his officers, and we found we were looking forward to it. Exposition is where most actors go to die. Lesser delivers it as if the information were his and the people in front of him were lucky to get it, and the series' politics come clearer each time he speaks. We should be honest that our own review did not name him, and that is a fair measure of the part: it is built to serve the machine, and he serves it without asking for credit.
The reservation, if it is one, is that the desk has become a habit. He is cast for authority so reliably that we can guess the costume before the credits, and the roles are nearly all supporting, so a reader looking for a Lesser performance to build an evening around will not find one here. That is the industry's choice more than his. Start with The Hour, and watch the eyebrow.
Biography
Anton Lesser is a British actor. He was born in Birmingham on 14 February 1952 and studied architecture at the University of Liverpool before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1977.
An associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has performed numerous Shakespearean roles on stage and television. His screen credits include Qyburn in Game of Thrones (2011–2019), Harold Macmillan in The Crown (2016), Major Partagaz in Andor (2022), and Thomas More in Wolf Hall (2015), for which he received a BAFTA nomination.
