There’s a quiet moment of poignancy early in Pierce Brosnan’s new boxing film, Giant. He plays Brendan Ingle, the garrulous real-life trainer whose gym in Sheffield became a breeding ground for headlining fighters including Prince Naseem “Naz” Hamed. Ingle, from Dublin, is depicted as a vulnerable, unselfconscious motormouth who hides self-doubt with braggadocio and is increasingly overlooked by the British boxing establishment. “No one is laughing at you, Brendan,” says his wife, Alma (played by Katherine Dow Blyton), when Ingle is at a particularly low ebb. “Aye,” he says in his Dublin vernacular. “But no one’s taking me seriously either.”
“I can identify with that line, as a man and as an actor,” says Brosnan today, smiling over a frothy coffee in a hotel in Knightsbridge, west London, where he is based for the five-month shoot of series two of Guy Ritchie’s stylish London crime drama MobLand. “I’ve tried to be truthful to myself and to do that within the work that I’ve done over many decades now. But yes, it’s a line that can resonate.”
The line, in fact, is the shorthand version of Brosnan’s career — 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 “proper” 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.
With Amir El-Masry and Toby Stephens in Giant
SAM TALOR
Not any more. I’m 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’s spy thriller Black Bag, a broad comic role in The Thursday Murder Club and a terrifying presence opposite Helen Mirren (who plays his wife) in MobLand. And now, after all that, he’s half-hidden under a prosthetic bald cap and “broken” nose playing Ingle in the kind of quirky character part they used to reserve for, say, Brian Cox or Jim Broadbent. What gives?
“It’s happened so gracefully really, in the last couple of years,” he says. “And I’m deeply grateful for it. I have a passion for the life of an actor. I’ve been at the table for a good while now and so I guess there’s a commercial value to my work too. It’s a very wonderful, comfortable, exciting place to be.”
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: “Interesting, time. Time past, time present, time future, time. Every time you’ve ever had.” He pauses, then adds: “I mean, I don’t look at the movies. I’ve never seen the Bond movies with my boys [his two sons, Dylan and Paris, with his second wife, Keely Shaye Smith]. I don’t know why. They’re just tucked away.”
With his wife, Keely Shaye Smith
CHARLES GUERIN/ABACA PRESS/ALAMY
He doesn’t 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. “I’m busy right now, sir,” 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 “sit in” on the interview, just to make sure Brosnan is on-message and that I’m under control. Big mistake. Brosnan, horrified, orders the publicist away — not just from the table but, humiliatingly, fully out of the restaurant, with a Conrad-style growl of “Bollocks to that!”
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He loves me, though. At least until I mention Bond. The rule here generally (we’ve 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’s 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.
As James Bond in 1997
KEITH HAMSHERE/GETTY IMAGES
“Of course he would enjoy Christmas!” he says, chuckling madly. Yes, I continue, immediately breaking the rule, but wouldn’t such a solitary figure rather be somewhere else, alone? Brosnan thinks for a second, then his smile cracks. “I don’t really want to answer the question and I’m not going to answer the question,” he says, deadpan. Because? He speaks slowly and carefully this time. “Because I couldn’t give a f***! Why would I waste my time thinking about where James Bond would be at Christmas?”
There’s another awkward pause, and while I’m contemplating just how quickly that went south, Pierce Brosnan, former James Bond and star of the Brosnaissance, suddenly beams again, happy as can be, adding: “But I know where Pierce Brosnan’s going to be spending Christmas! At home with my wife, in my little island retreat in Hawaii!”
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He waxes lyrical about his Hawaii home (he has another home in Malibu, California), and how Hawaii is like “Ireland with the heat turned up”, and how he’s 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: “I’m sorry for not being able to help you with James Bond. It’s something that’ll go on until the day is done. Connery was the same: ‘Don’t ever ask! Don’t ever ask!’ But, you know, I’m as excited as the next man or woman to find out who’s going to play that role again. It’s always exciting. I loved Sean, I loved Roger [Moore], Daniel [Craig] is amazing and Tim Dalton was amazing too.”
For Giant Brosnan went into a deep-dive of research, through documentaries and archive interviews, until he eventually felt, he says, that he was “living with this man day and night”. The result is a complex and innately sympathetic performance that fuels the painful tension at the heart of the film — that of a father figure who is eventually rejected by his adopted son, the resentful superstar fighter Hamed (played by Amir El-Masry).
The role is possibly his most personal yet. “I identified with his Irishness,” he says. “I identified with being an immigrant. And I know what it’s like to have travelled far as a young boy, to a distant land, and how hard it is to assimilate.” 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’t countenance a single mother in its midst. She fled to London, to become a nurse.
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 “dreams of being an actor, and being up on the big screen”. Brosnan says that he has “a sorrow and a pain for my mother and what she had to endure — from her family, from the church, and from being a single mother in the Fifties.” And yet, for himself and his life, “everything has unfolded organically and I don’t 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’m an actor.”
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Bit parts in big movies, such as The Long Good Friday and The Mirror Crack’d, 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’s career-making TV role as Remington Steele.
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 “what Bond did next”. 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’t Know How She Does It. He admits that his back catalogue is peppered with “a lot of dross also. But sometimes it just becomes a question of, ‘I need to find work.’ And luckily the doldrums never lasted too long.”
With Julie Walters, Amanda Seyfried and Christine Baranski in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
JONATHAN PRIME/UNIVERSAL PICTURES/AP
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. “Yes, I did notice that,” he says, bashfully. “But 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’s time to become the elder and just accept it.”
Mortality is often on his mind. “I think about dying, of course,” he says. “I 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’t worry. So why worry?”
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There have been regrets too about time spent away from family, from Harris first, then from Smith. “There’s been heartache, to be away from the family,” he says. “I’ve missed chapters of their lives, but I’ve provided for them, and taken care of them, and only ever been a plane ride away.”
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 “the sorrows of loves that have passed”, his impulse is “to go to the philosophical side of life. Try to rise to higher ground.”
About today’s film-making climate, he’s not optimistic. And although he’s a key player in the Netflix-backed Thursday Murder Club franchise, he finds the streaming giant’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros “unsettling … To have one dominant force that colours what we see, how we see it and where we see it is a change that doesn’t feel culturally right.
“I love cinema and I’ve 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?”
In London last month
GARETH CATTERMOLE/GETTY IMAGES
We return to MobLand and the possibility of a third series. “We’ll see where the wind takes us, Dame Helen and I. She is such a wonderful woman, a beautiful woman and a great actor. She recently said, ‘I hope they don’t kill us off.’ And I went, ‘Oh no, I hadn’t thought about that.’ 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.” He stops and giggles and adds, “It’s just a joy to play and to be free of so many old skins.”
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He’s looking forward to going home to Smith, he says, and “having a big hug and a kiss, and sitting down on the beach and holding hands”. Next year he will be back on the big screen in a blockbusting reboot of Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger, which is shooting in Australia, and starring opposite his Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again co-star Lily James.
Does he not, at 72, get tired of the constant upheaval and globetrotting? “I’ve done it all my life,” he says, shrugging. “I’ve packed my bag, gone a-roaming, showed up and hoped the cheque doesn’t bounce. I’ve loved being a gypsy. I’ve loved the life of an actor. And long may it last.”
Giant is in cinemas from Jan 9