The line, in fact, is the shorthand version of Brosnan\u2019s career \u2014 that of a gorgeous-looking clothes horse who found fame in four James Bond films, but was always craving more. And no matter what he did or how many \u201cproper\u201d films he delivered (see The Tailor of Panama, The Ghost, Love Is All You Need and Seraphim Falls), he was always regarded as a sexy tourist from Flemingville. <\/p>\n
![\"Film](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/\/4f17fbc1-1d89-4021-8c59-2328fab41c22.jpg\")
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With Amir El-Masry and Toby Stephens in Giant<\/p>\n
SAM TALOR<\/p>\n
Not any more. I\u2019m meeting Brosnan in the midst of a remarkable 11th-hour career renaissance (the Brosnaissance?) that has proved his startling versatility. This year alone has included a knockout turn in Steven Soderbergh\u2019s spy thriller Black Bag, a broad comic role in The Thursday Murder Club<\/a> and a terrifying presence opposite Helen Mirren (who plays his wife) in MobLand. And now, after all that, he\u2019s half-hidden under a prosthetic bald cap and \u201cbroken\u201d nose playing Ingle in the kind of quirky character part they used to reserve for, say, Brian Cox or Jim Broadbent. What gives? <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s happened so gracefully really, in the last couple of years,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I\u2019m deeply grateful for it. I have a passion for the life of an actor. I\u2019ve been at the table for a good while now and so I guess there\u2019s a commercial value to my work too. It\u2019s a very wonderful, comfortable, exciting place to be.\u201d <\/p>\n Brosnan beams. At 72, resplendent in a sharp grey suit and open-necked white shirt, he is impossibly handsome, warm in conversation but also intensely focused. He speaks softly, in that gentle trademark rasp that frequently drifts into long rolling sentences that occasionally approximate poetry. On ageing, he sighs and says: \u201cInteresting, time. Time past, time present, time future, time. Every time you\u2019ve ever had.\u201d He pauses, then adds: \u201cI mean, I don\u2019t look at the movies. I\u2019ve never seen the Bond movies with my boys [his two sons, Dylan and Paris, with his second wife, Keely Shaye Smith]. I don\u2019t know why. They\u2019re just tucked away.\u201d <\/p>\n With his wife, Keely Shaye Smith<\/p>\n CHARLES GUERIN\/ABACA PRESS\/ALAMY<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t suffer fools either, and I certainly see flashes of Conrad Harrigan, his ruthless Irish kingpin from MobLand, when a fortysomething fanboy wielding a smartphone approaches our table for a selfie. \u201cI\u2019m busy right now, sir,\u201d he hisses, eyes glaring, stopping the interloper in his tracks, six feet away. Soon an emissary from the publicity company representing Giant will arrive to \u201csit in\u201d on the interview, just to make sure Brosnan is on-message and that I\u2019m under control. Big mistake. Brosnan, horrified, orders the publicist away \u2014 not just from the table but, humiliatingly, fully out of the restaurant, with a Conrad-style growl of \u201cBollocks to that!\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 Pierce Brosnan: \u2018I don\u2019t live a Hollywood lifestyle\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n He loves me, though. At least until I mention Bond. The rule here generally (we\u2019ve met before) is that you get one free Bond question and the rest are going to cost you. And so, after a gloomy section of the chat when he\u2019s been reflecting on the end of cinema (of which more later), I try to lighten the mood by asking him whether or not James Bond would enjoy Christmas. <\/p>\n As James Bond in 1997<\/p>\n KEITH HAMSHERE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n \u201cOf course he would enjoy Christmas!\u201d he says, chuckling madly. Yes, I continue, immediately breaking the rule, but wouldn\u2019t such a solitary figure rather be somewhere else, alone? Brosnan thinks for a second, then his smile cracks. \u201cI don\u2019t really want to answer the question and I\u2019m not going to answer the question,\u201d he says, deadpan. Because? He speaks slowly and carefully this time. \u201cBecause I couldn\u2019t give a f***! Why would I waste my time thinking about where James Bond would be at Christmas?\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s another awkward pause, and while I\u2019m contemplating just how quickly that went south, Pierce Brosnan, former James Bond<\/a> and star of the Brosnaissance, suddenly beams again, happy as can be, adding: \u201cBut I know where Pierce Brosnan\u2019s going to be spending Christmas! At home with my wife, in my little island retreat in Hawaii!\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 Andrew Scott, Pierce Brosnan and Sharon Horgan on being Irish<\/a><\/p>\n He waxes lyrical about his Hawaii home (he has another home in Malibu, California), and how Hawaii is like \u201cIreland with the heat turned up\u201d, and how he\u2019s still thinking about buying a third home near Dublin. Then suddenly he interrupts himself and softly and sweetly apologises for his reaction to the bugbear of Bond-related nonsense, saying: \u201cI\u2019m sorry for not being able to help you with James Bond. It\u2019s something that\u2019ll go on until the day is done. Connery was the same: \u2018Don\u2019t ever ask! Don\u2019t ever ask!\u2019 But, you know, I\u2019m as excited as the next man or woman to find out who\u2019s going to play that role again. It\u2019s always exciting. I loved Sean, I loved Roger [Moore], Daniel [Craig] is amazing and Tim Dalton was amazing too.\u201d <\/p>\n For Giant Brosnan went into a deep-dive of research, through documentaries and archive interviews, until he eventually felt, he says, that he was \u201cliving with this man day and night\u201d. The result is a complex and innately sympathetic performance that fuels the painful tension at the heart of the film \u2014 that of a father figure who is eventually rejected by his adopted son, the resentful superstar fighter Hamed (played by Amir El-Masry). <\/p>\n The role is possibly his most personal yet. \u201cI identified with his Irishness,\u201d he says. \u201cI identified with being an immigrant. And I know what it\u2019s like to have travelled far as a young boy, to a distant land, and how hard it is to assimilate.\u201d He is referring to his complicated childhood. He was brought up by his grandparents in Navan, Co Meath, in the 1950s after his mother, May, was doubly abandoned, first by her husband and then by a toxic priest-ridden Ireland that couldn\u2019t countenance a single mother in its midst. She fled to London, to become a nurse. <\/p>\n Brosnan joined her, aged 11, in Putney, west London and was bullied at school for being Irish. He was eventually saved by a drama workshop at the Oval House theatre in Lambeth and \u201cdreams of being an actor, and being up on the big screen\u201d. Brosnan says that he has \u201ca sorrow and a pain for my mother and what she had to endure \u2014 from her family, from the church, and from being a single mother in the Fifties.\u201d And yet, for himself and his life, \u201ceverything has unfolded organically and I don\u2019t carry any resentment. The separation and that feeling of aloneness that I felt, or of not being wanted? That has fed into the imagination of positive doing and of life. Hence I\u2019m an actor.\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 The 13 best young actors of the year \u2014 who wins our award?<\/a><\/p>\n Bit parts in big movies, such as The Long Good Friday and The Mirror Crack\u2019d, followed before his first wife, Cassandra Harris (who died of ovarian cancer in 1991), cannily spotted an advert for cheap second mortgages in the Evening Standard. They duly lied about needing central-heating improvements and used the cash to finance the Los Angeles audition trip that snagged Brosnan\u2019s career-making TV role as Remington Steele. <\/p>\n There was a Bond false start in the late 1980s when the Remington Steele producers refused to release Brosnan from his contract for the 007 gig (it eventually went to Dalton). But Bond returned again with GoldenEye in 1995 and informed a subsequent career that was too often seen through the demeaning lens of \u201cwhat Bond did next\u201d. And so he lurched from the audience-pleasing highs of The Thomas Crown Affair and Mamma Mia! to the dubious lows of After the Sunset and I Don\u2019t Know How She Does It. He admits that his back catalogue is peppered with \u201ca lot of dross also. But sometimes it just becomes a question of, \u2018I need to find work.\u2019 And luckily the doldrums never lasted too long.\u201d<\/p>\n With Julie Walters, Amanda Seyfried and Christine Baranski in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again<\/p>\n JONATHAN PRIME\/UNIVERSAL PICTURES\/AP<\/p>\n He relishes his status as an elder statesman of cinema. His Black Bag director, Steven Soderbergh, told me Brosnan was something of a guru on set, with younger actors gathered round him, starry-eyed and respectful. \u201cYes, I did notice that,\u201d he says, bashfully. \u201cBut there comes a time when you look around and see the clapper loader and the camera person and, well, you realise that you are the oldest one on the set. So then it\u2019s time to become the elder and just accept it.\u201d <\/p>\n Mortality is often on his mind. \u201cI think about dying, of course,\u201d he says. \u201cI think what day? What time? What place? But then you just have to take a big deep breath and let it all go and give thanks. You die if you worry, you die if you don\u2019t worry. So why worry?\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 Pierce Brosnan: A second Mamma Mia? My my, how could I resist it?<\/a><\/p>\n There have been regrets too about time spent away from family, from Harris first, then from Smith. \u201cThere\u2019s been heartache, to be away from the family,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve missed chapters of their lives, but I\u2019ve provided for them, and taken care of them, and only ever been a plane ride away.\u201d <\/p>\n His daughter Charlotte, from his marriage to Harris, died of cancer in 2013, and in a previous interview he told me that, when faced with \u201cthe sorrows of loves that have passed\u201d, his impulse is \u201cto go to the philosophical side of life. Try to rise to higher ground.\u201d<\/p>\n About today\u2019s film-making climate, he\u2019s not optimistic. And although he\u2019s a key player in the Netflix-backed Thursday Murder Club franchise, he finds the streaming giant\u2019s proposed takeover of Warner Bros<\/a> \u201cunsettling \u2026 To have one dominant force that colours what we see, how we see it and where we see it is a change that doesn\u2019t feel culturally right. <\/p>\n \u201cI love cinema and I\u2019ve seen cinemas evaporate from the landscape where I live in California, and here in London. Netflix has given me employment, but you have to be diligent and ask yourself: how do you now traverse these waters without getting mangled and embittered by it?\u201d<\/p>\n In London last month<\/p>\n GARETH CATTERMOLE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n We return to MobLand and the possibility of a third series. \u201cWe\u2019ll see where the wind takes us, Dame Helen and I<\/a>. She is such a wonderful woman, a beautiful woman and a great actor. She recently said, \u2018I hope they don\u2019t kill us off.\u2019 And I went, \u2018Oh no, I hadn\u2019t thought about that.\u2019 We were talking about our taxes at the time, sitting in the back of a hearse in Kensal Rise at seven in the morning for a funeral scene.\u201d He stops and giggles and adds, \u201cIt\u2019s just a joy to play and to be free of so many old skins.\u201d <\/p>\n![\"Pierce](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/\/2ab09e56-2cff-4309-9df2-0f7a33ccf065.jpg\")
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