Dame Helen Mirren admits it herself: she does “bitch” well.
Far less intimidating in real life than she is on the small screen in the TV crime drama Mobland, Mirren tells The Watchlist that she and co-star Pierce Brosnan relished the opportunity to dive into the meaty roles of the matriarch and patriarch of a notoriously unforgiving gangster family for a second time.
“What a treat at this end of our lives, you know what I mean?” Mirren asks as she sits alongside Brosnan in a London hotel to discuss the acclaimed Paramount+ show.
“If I was in my forties and someone said, ‘You know, just wait, you’re going to have one of the best roles of your life when you’re in your blahblahblah …’
“You know, it came. And it is a miracle. It’s fabulous. We have such a good time doing this.”
Mirren plays Maeve to Brosnan’s Conrad, the pair ruthlessly sitting at the helm of the Harrigan crime family. Family – a highly dysfunctional one at that, to which many of us would likely relate – is at the centre of the story from creator Ronan Bennet.
“I think it surprised the two of us really because we were doing (2025 film) The Thursday Murder Club together and this job came along and I read the script,” recalls Brosnan.
“We both read the script, and Helen said, ‘Are you going to do it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think I’m going to do it, I want to come back to London’, and she said, ‘OK, let’s jump at it.”
Looking at her co-star, Mirren adds, “We held our noses and jumped in the deep end.”
The pair had previously appeared on screen together in classic British gangster film The Long Good Friday back in 1980, and more than 45 years later, their on-and off-screen chemistry remains.
“It is all down to Pierce, I am a bitch and really difficult and he’s an angel,” Mirren cracks.
Watching the pair chat freely is like enjoying a rally between comrades in a warm-up before a Wimbledon tennis match.
They finish each other’s sentences and speak with great affection and admiration, more like lifelong friends than colleagues.
“I just let her take the field here; I just followed her, you know,” Brosnan explains.
“It has been a joy. Guy Ritchie (director and executive producer), when we kicked off the season, said, ‘Can you believe it?’ He said it a few times, so it is lovely to be an unexpected surprise.”
Also starring Tom Hardy, Paddy Considine, Joanne Froggatt and Toby Jones, the second season of Mobland doesn’t hold back, with serious bloody action from the opening minutes of the first episode.
“It’s the best playground to play in so far,” Mandeep Dhillon, who plays Seraphina Harrigan, tells The Watchlist.
“I mean, you’ve got Dame HM, as we call her, DHM at the helm, being kind of this Machiavellian Lady M character, master puppeteer, which kind of sets the bar, and all of us have been fortunate enough to be given lovely, juicy, complex storylines, even more so in season two.
When The Watchlist offers to Mirren that she plays “bitch” well, she smiles and replies: “I do, I know. It is very weird playing Maeve.
“I don’t know where she comes from, quite honestly. I walk on, I put the costume on and I’m just in another world.
“I don’t take her home with me at all, I’m not that sort of actress but I get in there and I’m just …”
To that, Brosnan chimes in: “It is a free for all. It is a street fight. Likewise for me with Conrad.
“When you read the text by Jez Butterworth, this great writer, he just gives you these jewels, this wonderful character, but honestly, I thought about how to play it and then when I came to play it on the very first day, it just popped out of the box.”
In response, Mirren notes that she can “feel that. I see that happen. He is so different from you as a person.”
Mobland season two is streaming now on Paramount+. Read the full cover story with Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan in a new issue of The Watchlist, out in the Sunday papers.