Smooth and sonorous, distant yet endearing, Irish in his imagination and in his soul, Pierce Brosnan refuses to be drawn on his feelings about Tony Blair, on whom his latest film role is based – though he will give his side of the James Bond story
WE HAVE BECOME so used to Pierce Brosnan – the smoothie is now an unlikely 56 – that it’s easy to forget quite what a peculiar man he is. He always assures interviewers that he is Irish. But, watching him in the 1980s TV show Remington Steele, you found yourself wondering how anybody could manage to so perfectly blend American consonants with Mayfair vowels. Then there’s the disconcerting theatricality he adopts when off-screen. Rumbling into his London hotel room, all Tom Ford and eau de cologne, he places himself straight-backed into a chair and proceeds to deliver his sonorous answers to a space just above my right shoulder.
“How’s everything in Ireland?” he says. “I haven’t been back for a few years. But I will always be Irish in my imagination and in my soul. I want to come back and work there soon. I need to top up my Irishness.” That is how he talks. In the course of our conversation, he says “company of players” when he means “actors”, “this land” when he means “England” and “vortex of fame” when he means “celebrity”. It’s actually rather endearing. This is, one imagines, the class of lexicon that older theatrical knights would have used when being interviewed for the BBC Home Service.
You could see all this as a façade to conceal the small-town Irish boy within, but, to be fair, he takes every opportunity to parade his roots. At any rate, the world of film and TV has showed a continuing appetite for Pierce's class of suave assurance. He has, of course, played James Bond. He croaked spectacularly through the mind-bendingly popular Mamma Mia!And, now, finding an ingenious new use for his regular persona, he plays a thinly veiled version of Tony Blair in Roman Polanski's fine adaptation of Robert Harris's thriller The Ghost.
“The first question out of my mouth when I met Roman was: ‘Am I playing Blair?’ I found it quite humorous that an Irishman was playing a a British ex-prime minister. But you could say the same about Bond.
"There was a mischievousness with Roman: 'You are not being Blair, but all roads lead to Blair.' It is layered with Shakespearian grandiosity." The film finds Ewan McGregor playing a ghostwriter drafted in to energise a retired prime minister's memoirs. As events progress, it becomes clear that, when in office, the politician employed shady practices to propel his country towards an illegal war (sound familiar?). The Ghostcomes to some savage conclusions as regards its subject's craven toadying to the American allies. The character seems to have been little more than a stooge for the US state department.
Would that be a fair criticism of the real Tony Blair? Brosnan looks slightly puzzled.
“Too harsh? No, I don’t think so. Within the theatrical playing of it and the fictitious characters we have here, it adds to the mystery and the conceit within the piece.” Huh? What does he think of Blair personally? He must have considered the politician’s motivations? “Oh, I really couldn’t be articulate about him,” he says between hums and haws. “I don’t really have much to do with his politics. I live at a distance from this land. It all gets filtered through the American airwaves. It is interesting to see him in the news again, though, recently.” What an odd answer. Unless he’s just being cautious, he really doesn’t seem to have thought very deeply about what happens within Tony Blair’s skull. The more you talk to Brosnan, the stranger he seems.
AN ONLY CHILD, Pierce Brosnan came from a fairly humble background. Born in Drogheda, the son of a carpenter, he was raised largely by grandparents when, following his father’s abandonment, his mother moved to England to work as a nurse. He remembers his Christian Brothers school with no affection whatsoever, but is clearly prepared to entertain some nostalgic feelings towards those gambolling days. His production company is, after all, named Irish DreamTime.
“That life had its difficulties, but there was a beauty to it as well,” he says. “My grandfather was a well-liked member of society. He built his own home. His children all went to private schools. But it was a fractured life of divorce – well not actually divorce then – and abandonment. But there was a oneness through it all. Mind you, the Christian Brothers were a mangled bunch. Terrible people.”
In the mid-1960s, Brosnan and his family moved to south London. He was (inevitably) nicknamed “Irish” and experienced a degree of bullying.
Like many budding actors before him, he developed his skills as a way of distracting and amusing potential assailants. It was at this early stage that, keen to fit in, he began to consciously transform his accent into its current exotic hybrid.
“It was knuckles, fighting and prejudice. I hadn’t experienced prejudice before,” he remembers.
After a spell training as a commercial illustrator, he took up a place at the famously rigorous Drama Centre in London. Blessed (occasionally cursed) with those chiselled good looks, he claims he managed to make a living from the moment he received his diploma. (You can catch a brief glimpse of him in the classic crime thriller The Long Good Friday.)
Then, in the early 1980s, he got that role as a smooth faux-detective in the US series Remington Steele. I imagine that he must now have mixed feelings about the show. It catapulted him to fame, but it also delayed his ascension to the Throne of Bond. When speculation emerged that he might succeed Roger Moore, public interest in Steeleheightened and – irony of ironies – the show's producers elected to extend its run and enforce the star's draconian contract. In a weird Catch 22, coming so close to the big role tied him closer to his old job and ensured that Timothy Dalton would become the fourth official Bond.
"Oh, I look back on Remingtonwith nothing but affection," he says. "I came to LA on one of Freddie Laker's cut-price fares – just a ham sandwich at the back of the plane – got a car from Rent a Wreck, went to my first audition and it was Remington. In America, I found I could be whomever I wanted. Nobody forced me to be the Irishman or the man with the mid-Atlantic twang. In America I fitted right in. That was a powerful job and it made everything else possible. Then there was a possibility of Bond and I thought: I'm about to be a superstar."
As things worked out, he had to wait until 1995 to become 007. The slickest (for good or ill) of all Bonds, he appeared in four episodes, culminating with Die Another Dayin 2002. The manner of his leaving the role is still a subject of some controversy. Rumours had been put about that Brosnan was standing down of his own accord, but he has always maintained that nothing could have been farther from the truth.
“No, no, no. The chop came in a phone call. At first it was: ‘Welcome back and the negotiations are underway.’ Then suddenly I heard they were no longer underway. Somebody said: ‘Resign.’ I said that would be a lie. It’s them that want to change and if I resign I am perpetuating a lie. You make the change and you walk away. It was a mighty blow at the time. But I hope I have taken it with some grace.”
It must have been doubly galling when Daniel Craig, his replacement, was so heavily praised for bringing invigorating degrees of grit to the role in the hugely successful Casino Royale. “I have never seen the new ones,” he says. “I tried watching one at 35,000 feet on a plane. It came on and I thought: let’s see what’s going on here. Then it broke down. They fixed it and it broke down again. I thought: this is fate. And I’ve never watched one since.”
To be fair to the old trouper, he has made a surprisingly good fist of living without James Bond. In the past five years, he did good work opposite Liam Neeson in the western Seraphim Falls, was impressive as a hitman in The Matadorand – still in cinemas as you read – convinced as Robert Pattinson's dad in the weepy Remember Me. All this and his bizarre performance in (no, really) one of the most financially successful films of all time: the deliciously absurd Mamma Mia!His most interesting recent role remains, however, that in The Ghost.
We should count ourselves lucky that the film saw the light of day. Post-production had only begun when Polanski was arrested by Swiss police for that decades-old statutory rape charge.
“I was shocked speechless when I heard,” he says. “The first words that came to me were: why now, after all these years? They could have caught this man who fled from their grasp at any time. The theories fly left, right and centre. I wish for his family to have closure. I have become very fond of him. I am sure the man has suffered quietly for all the deeds done.” After that characteristically theatrical “all the deeds done”, he emits one of the loudest sighs I’ve ever heard. He genuinely is one of a dying breed of “players”, this Brosnan. You can’t but wish him well.
Sure, he now lives in a big house near Malibu with his beautiful wife, American journalist Keely Shaye Smith, and several gorgeous children, but there have, let us remember, been tragedies throughout his life.
There was that difficult upbringing and, in 1991, his first wife, Cassandra Harris, died appallingly young from ovarian cancer. “That leaves an indelible footprint on the heart and the soul,” he muses. “You think life will never be the same again once you’ve been part of the death of someone you love. That’s a powerful experience.
“You think you will never feel a death again. Then you suddenly realise: my death is still coming. Stop the clock. You just try and have a good time. What’s for you won’t go by you.”
The Ghostis on limited release from April 16th
