When I told friends I’d be talking to Pierce Brosnan, more than one jocularly suggested I should ask if he planned to stand for president of Ireland. That race is in a state of head-spinning chaos. This fellow is in. Then he’s out again. This person isn’t going to run. Now they are.
Madder notions than Brosnan have been suggested. You can easily imagine him welcoming the king of Belgium to a barbecue at Áras an Uachtaráin.
“I have never considered it, nor will I consider such a notion,” he says. “No, there are better men than I for such a post. I love being an actor. Being an actor has been my life force.”
He seems amused by the idea but also flattered that his name has come up even in jest.
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“That’s very nice of people who say such things,” he says. “But I think, with us Irish folks, we travel well. There’s a warmth to our people. There’s a warmth, and there’s a strength. There’s a fine alchemy of madness and a delicious kind of boldness.”
There is no getting away from the fact that Brosnan, now in his early 70s, looks utterly fabulous. As we are settling into our seats at Claridge’s – still the grandest of the old Mayfair hotels – in London, he mentions he decided to put a suit on this morning. Well, obviously! I could no more imagine him arriving in casual clothes than I could imagine him turning up dressed as a Morris dancer. He is that bloody suave.
I suppose you could take him for a chap of his age, but, though a tad creased, he still looks as conventionally handsome as the Navan man who found fame on the American detective series Remington Steele 40 years ago.
Such is his image that many fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club were puzzled when he was cast as Ron Ritchie, former trade-union bruiser, in Netflix’s imminent adaptation of that hugely successful cosy-crime novel. They were expecting someone in the Ray Winstone vein.
“When I read it I thought: Ray,” he says, amused. “North London? Maybe south London? I’m Irish. My Irish accent has kind of diminished over the years. But it’s there somewhere. I just went with the flow of it, really. I went with the flow of the casting. I love Ron. Ron and I are joined at the hip.”
Brosnan has done all right for himself. Childhood in Drogheda and Navan. Adolescence in London. Acting school at the city’s prestigious Drama Centre. Telly work in the United States. A life-changing stint as James Bond, Ian Fleming’s indestructible spy, during the millennial years.
But I do wonder if being that handsome might occasionally have been a problem. He doesn’t get the character roles that come the way of Brian Cox or Brendan Gleeson.
“Ha ha! They’re coming down the road. I’d like to think they are.”
Brosnan remembers meeting John Huston to discuss a role in the director’s famous 1987 adaptation of James Joyce’s story The Dead.
“I sat there with the greatest trepidation but absolute enthusiasm and passion for the work,” he says. “And then I heard this wheezing noise – the wheezing noise of emphysema. This man walked in. This great man with his oxygen tank. And he sat down. He just looked. And he said, ‘Too handsome! Too handsome!’ Handsome is as handsome does. It can get in the way.”
Brosnan has always come across as a nice fellow. But what isn’t so clear until you sit down alone with him is his singular eccentricity. He has always had a habit of drifting off into airy meditations on the role of the performer. As the monologues coil out, the soft Irish vowels take over.
“There are some Celtic genes here that have aligned themselves in this countenance and given me this lovely life of being an actor – an entertainer,” is something he actually says.
I left Ireland, 12th of August, 1964. It just happened to be the same day that Ian Fleming passed
It has been an odd and not always easy life. He is the only son of a carpenter dad and, still with us in her 90s, his indomitable mother, May. His father left the family when Pierce was just a child, and May subsequently went to London to work as a nurse. Raised by aunts, uncles and grandparents, Brosnan eventually travelled, at the age of 12, across the Irish Sea to reunite with Mum and meet her new husband.
“I left Ireland, 12th of August, 1964,” he says. “It just happened to be the same day that Ian Fleming passed. I found that out later in life. I was always touched by the curiosity of that. But I remember my first day in Putney, walking down the high street with my mum. I was looking for the big American cars. I was looking for America.”
Brosnan eventually made it there. But it took a leap of faith. He spent a while studying at St Martin’s School of Art – he still paints – but eventually answered a nagging urge and took himself to the Drama Centre, in northwest London. I have spoken to other alumni of that institution, and they talk of a tough training in the “method school”. The list of graduates is impressive.
“Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Michael Fassbender, Frances de la Tour, Jack Shepherd. Great people, great actors,” says Brosnan. “So that’s my job. That’s my work. And you want to stretch yourself as much as possible.”
Work seems to have been intermittent after he graduated, in 1975. He had a famous small role as the IRA man who does for Bob Hoskins in the 1980 gangster classic The Long Good Friday. He was in the odd Play for Today, on the BBC. Life properly changed when he was cast in the ABC miniseries The Manions of America. That finally brought Brosnan and his then wife, the Australian actor Cassandra Harris, to southern California. The sleek detective show Remington Steele soon came his way.
“Going to America, I kind of painted myself into a corner with this Mr Smooth, this Mr Sophisticated,” he says. “I tried to be Cary Grant while I was doing Remington Steele. I looked at all his films. I was already a great fan. The director, Bob Butler, said, ‘We’re doing an old movie. This is an old movie.’ Cary Grant movies move with the speed of light – the alacrity of the speech. I loved the elegance of clothes. So I leaned into that.”
The route to James Bond was a knotty one. Rumour has it that as far back as 1981, when Cassandra Harris appeared in For Your Eyes Only, Cubby Broccoli, producer of the 007 films, had his eye on Brosnan to eventually succeed Roger Moore.
When the role became free in 1986, Remington Steele looked to be winding to a close, but, in an awkward irony, the gossip around Brosnan’s possible elevation to 007 revived ratings and the series was renewed, thus eliminating him from Bond consideration.
It was nearly a decade later, following two films with Timothy Dalton and further hiatus because of rights issues, that Brosnan finally got the part. Goldeneye, in 1995, was followed by three further successful episodes.
I know Brosnan is sick to death of talking about the state of current Bond, but I am genuinely fascinated to hear his views on Barbara Broccoli, daughter of the late Cubby, handing creative control of the sequence over to Amazon MGM.
“Oh, I wish them well. Barbara was such a deep part of my life,” he says. “I don’t think Amazon will drop the ball. I’d like to think they will keep the legacy alive – and keep the passion for this character and all the emblems that go with the character alive. And also refresh it. Give it a shot in the arm with imagination and creative thinking.”
There has always been a fear that playing James Bond can eat up a career. It is certainly true that you will be asked about the imperial thug for the rest of your life. But Sean Connery and Daniel Craig both managed to do other things.
So has Brosnan. Over the past two decades, since he vacated the position, he has broadened his range. Golden Globe nominated for The Matador, in 2005. As a variation on Tony Blair in The Ghost, from 2010. He was magnificent earlier this year as an intelligence chief in Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag.
“As I say often, it’s the gift that keeps giving,” he says of Bond. “It has allowed me to traverse the waters of independent films, which I love. I love making independent movies. I love the creative life of being an actor. It’s exciting. It’s exhilarating.”
He seems to have had no illusions about the brief.
“I was aware of it all, walking into that house all those years ago,” he says. I was aware that the label and the enormity of the character would be forever with me – and, one hopes, in a positive way.”
Brosnan, who says that if Denis Villeneuve, director of the next 007 film, “had something up his sleeve I would look at it in a heartbeat”, now finds himself part of a very different cultural phenomenon. Published in September 2020, The Thursday Murder Club, in which a gaggle of pensioners solve crimes, became a pandemic sensation for its famously lanky author.
Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie now costar in an agreeable adaptation from the Harry Potter director Chris Columbus (whose first big film was Home Alone, and who first directed Brosnan in Mrs Doubtfire). What may surprise some is how directly the film engages with mortality and the wider challenges of ageing.
“It deals with the day-to-day ailments of diminishing life – of life dwindling down – and beautifully so, beautifully so,” says Brosnan. “I think that’s what will capture the audience’s heart. Richard’s storytelling and the characters he creates are so well founded.”
Has Brosnan any wisdom on the business of ageing?
“I’m 72 now, and I’m enjoying life enormously,” he says. “There’s an ease to it. There’s a charm to it. There’s a wisdom to it. There’s a patience to it that you have to give to yourself. Mortality is circling the wagons. You know you’re dealing with time. You’re dealing with time past, time present, time future, and just the gift of life and the joy of life.”
It is something to still have his mother around at his age.
“I saw her at the weekend there,” he says. “I took my son with me, Dylan Thomas. He’s a young film-maker. We went up to see May. She’s 93. She’s still going. She’s still strong, still wonderful. She had the Daily Mail on Saturday, and we were on the cover: Ben, Dame Helen, Celia and myself. I said, ‘Can I keep this?’ And she said, ‘No. It’s got my TV guide in there’!”
Brosnan seems genuinely delighted to have someone from home in the suite at Claridge’s. At one peculiar moment we are interrupted by a chap abseiling down to clean the exterior of the first-floor window. It really is like something from a Bond film.
“I’m trying to talk to my fellow countryman here!” he says in mock anger. “Trying to stitch some answers together that are cohesive.”
Living most of the year in Hawaii with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith – Cassandra Harris died of cancer in 1991 – Brosnan now has dual Irish and US citizenship. Is that a juggling act?
“I’m an Irishman,” he says. “I’m an Irishman through and through, burnished by a beautiful life as a young man, as an actor, in England, and now in America. America embraced me. I dropped in there in 1982. I found success and ...”
Here he does something peculiar. His voice drops. He sighs deeply. Then he laughs in what sounds like disbelief.
“I’m ... an ... American citizen. Yes, I am. I raised my hand, and they let me in the door. And it hurts my heart to see what’s happening now with the country.”
He means politically?
“Oh, politically and just spiritually, economically – emotionally for the people. But, you know, as they say, the pendulum swings. One must have hope and faith that we shall come through these challenging times.”
The Thursday Murder Club is on Netflix from Thursday, August 28th
