Friendship between barmitzvah boy and old man in care home spurs unlikely hit film
Anton Lesser stars in award-winning short film as part of UKJFF
They tell actors: “Never work with children or animals,” but the near-perfect synchronicity between well-established actor Anton Lesser and teenager Kit Rakusen, just starting out on his career, belies that rule.
The pair star in Beshert, a beautiful short film due to be shown on 10 November at the UK Jewish Film Festival. It is one of two winners of this year’s Pears Short Film Fund awards.
Gary Enkin’s charming script, directed by Lewis Rose, brings to life an unlikely friendship between Lesser, playing a gruff old man in a Leeds care home, and reluctant barmitzvah boy Oliver Simons, Kit Rakusen’s role. Filming took place in a disused wing of south London’s Nightingale House.
Birmingham-born Lesser, who jokes that he summoned up his “all-purpose Northern accent” in order to play Mr Pinsky, fell into the part by accident.
“In the spring I was rehearsing a production of Hamlet at Stratford, directed by Rupert Goold. I was playing the Ghost and I was sharing a dressing room with the actor Elliot Levey. I’d never worked with him before but we got on well, and he told me that he’d been approached by [film critic] Jason Solomons to direct this short film — but that he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do it. He asked me to read the script.
“I was about a page in and I said, ‘this is brilliant’. Elliot asked me if I would play Mr Pinsky if he directed it. I said yes immediately. It touched my heart right away; and I’ve got to the age (he is 73) when if something doesn’t touch me, I’m not really that interested in doing it. If I can afford to say no to something, I will say no, because life’s too short to do something that isn’t full of love.”
It transpired that Elliot Levey could not direct the film — but co-producers Solomons and Naomi Gryn told prospective funders that Lesser was staying with the project, as a result of which the film was greenlit.
He comes from “a very loving, working-class family… my dad was a hairdresser, my mum was a dressmaker. Jewishness was part of life. We weren’t Orthodox and I don’t really think of myself as a Jewish actor, but I had a barmitzvah. I know that my dad’s dad was from Warsaw and the name was Lefkovich, changed when he came to Birmingham. My mum’s family were Cohens, and her father was a tailor”.
Though Lesser may not wholly embrace his Jewish background, one of his two daughters (who prefers to use the pronoun ‘they’) was so interested in the heritage that they were prompted to have a batmitzvah. Lesser does concede that in recent years he has become more curious about that part of his early life.
After school, he went to Liverpool University to study architecture, and then spent time abroad with the Voluntary Service Overseas charity. While in Nigeria, he saw a film about the Royal Shakespeare Company “and that was it”. He gave up his job in architecture, returned to the UK, moved to London and enrolled in Rada (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).
Shortly after his 1977 graduation, he began working in Stratford with the RSC and has barely stopped working since. His TV roles have included Thomas More in the BAFTA-award-winning Wolf Hall, Qyburn in Game of Thrones, and the somewhat shy and retiring police commissioner Reginald Bright in the Morse prequel, the hugely popular Endeavour.
His distinctive voice has graced numerous films and radio productions, including, for the BBC, playing the Roman detective Marcus Didius Falco in Lindsey Davis’ award-winning “toga thrillers”.
Today, Lesser thinks his parents must have been concerned about his throwing up a promising career as an architect “in order to become a rogue and a vagabond”. But they never expressed this concern, giving him love and support “because they just wanted me to be happy, and I hope that’s what I have passed on to my kids, too.” In fact, he says, he has been “absolutely blessed” and has rarely spent long periods out of work.
As Mr Pinsky in Beshert, Lesser tries to persuade a mulish Oliver that being barmitzvah will be a bonus in his life — and he summons up a blessing from his own long-ago barmitzvah, delivered impeccably by the actor. Then he explains to him what beshert means, telling him how he met his wife and keeping close the memory of his son who died fighting in Israel. The script elegantly and concisely draws on these memories in a way many longer feature films fail to do.
As for working with Kit Rakusen (14), Lesser has nothing but praise. “He’s absolutely wonderful,” he says. “It was a privilege; he’s very level-headed, so unassuming, incredibly intelligent and sensitive. He was delightful — we laughed a lot together. He was a joy to work with. If he decides to go on acting, I think he has a great career ahead of him.”
In fact, Rakusen has appeared as one of the Enid Blyton Famous Five on BBC and this year has starred in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and in Jay Kelly, the new film from Noah Baumbach. He is also one of the leads in the new film Good Boy, as the son of characters played by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough.
So what’s next for Anton Lesser? He will be seen in the new Harry Potter series, playing Ollivander, the wandmaker. But he has also been closely involved with travelling words and music shows run by the independent company Hambletts, in which Lesser works with an orchestra while delivering extracts from the featured writers.
One is about Laurie Lee, called Red Sky at Night, and another is devoted to the work of Thomas Hardy. “They are just beautiful events — we do these shows all over the country. We just did a week at Wilton’s Music Hall (in London) – and if you were moved by Mr Pinsky, you will be moved by these shows, because they are very, very heartwarming.”
The world premiere of Beshert is on 10 November at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley at 8pm. ukjewishfilm.org
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