Game of Thrones actor Anton Lesser receives Honorary Degree
The actor and University of Liverpool graduate Anton Lesser has been awarded an honorary degree by the University.
Anton Lesser graduated in Architecture from the University in 1973. He received the award earlier this week at a ceremony in the new Liverpool School of Architecture building, which he officially opened the same evening. During the event, he joined the audience for a fireside conversation about his time at the University and his career.
Gallery
Anton’s journey: From architecture to acting
Born in Birmingham, Lesser wanted to be an architect as a child and secured a place on the course at Liverpool. By his own account he was a good student, but not always a dedicated one. During his student days, there were signs acting would play a big part in his future. He joined the University’s dramatic society, where he made most of his friends, including his best friend to this day.
Speaking about those years in a 2017 interview with the University, he credits Liverpool with giving him far more than a 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.”
After graduating, Lesser went to Nigeria for a year with the Voluntary Service Overseas. He recalled feeling vulnerable, timid and, as he put it himself, hopelessly out of his depth as the head of a team building a large hotel. Nine months into his placement, he went to a British Council screening for volunteers that changed the course of his life. The film was about Stratford-upon-Avon and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and less than three years later he was working for that same company.
Describing that moment, he said: “There was something inside me that just went off like a bomb. It was like the cosmos had lifted me up and said ‘it’s time to do this’. And that was it, I had no choice, it was completely choiceless…”
If you’d like to read the full interview, you can find it within the 2017 edition of our Alumni magazine.
Watch Anton’s interview with the University from 2017
Anton’s roles
- Qyburn in Game of Thrones
- Garrick Olivander in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter TV series
- Tomas More in Wolf Hall
- Harold Macmillan in The Crown
- Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright in Endeavor
- Lord John Carteret in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Strager Tides
- Harold Warne in Miss Potter
New Liverpool School of Architecture Building now open
The new Liverpool School of Architecture Building, which Lesser officially opened on the 5 November 2026, was designed by Dublin based architects O’Donnell and Tuomey.
The new extension is expressed as the latest in a series of three buildings accommodating the School, each reflecting the architectural period in which they were built. The sequence progresses from the formality of the Georgian terrace addressing Abercromby Square, through the less rigid modernism of the 1930s building at the centre of the composition, to the dynamic informality of the ODT addition.
The three buildings express the primary activities each contains – offices, workshops and studios – and are woven together by a diagonal circulation system, linking the major spaces both in plan and at the variety of existing floor levels in section.
Thank you to our generous graduates.
Last year, thanks to alumni donations, final year architects visited Ghana, learning how to create buildings for tropical climates.
Visit the Exhibition
Housed within the new Liverpool School of Architecture building, you can see the new building by attending the Liverpool School of Architecture Retrospective Exhibition, which runs until December 18 2026 and is free to visit. The Exhibition celebrates the School’s history and includes drawings, fabrics, films, books, products and models.