‘I enjoy playing good guys and bad guys’ – Pierce Brosnan on his varied career
The 71-year-old’s latest role is as ‘a mad, mangled, psychopathic war crime boss’ but he doesn’t entirely rule out a return as 007.
When Pierce Brosnan burst on to cinema screens as our favourite secret agent, James Bond, in GoldenEye (1995) he reinvented the 007 franchise for a post-Cold War era. Brosnan was brilliant, combining charm and style with confidence and deadly intent. It is 30 years since Brosnan first drove an Aston Martin, fired a Walther PPK and asked for a martini, shaken not stirred.
He went on to make three more Bond films – Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002) – before his licence to kill was revoked and handed to Daniel Craig. Brosnan was hoping to make a fifth film but producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson told him it was time to go in a new direction.
When Amazon purchased MGM in 2022, it gained a half-share in the Bond franchise and recently took creative control of the long-running film series from Broccoli and Wilson after a protracted stalemate on the future of the super spy from MI6 invented by novelist Ian Fleming.
There is now speculation about continuing the film series alongside spin-offs in multiple directions to recoup some of the $US8.45bn shelled out for MGM. Will we see the backstory of spy boss M or gadget man Q? The secret life of Miss Moneypenny? Or the adventures of 006 and 008? What about a mature Bond? Would Brosnan return? The grey-blue eyes, square jaw and swept back hair is, still, unmistakeable.
Review put it to Bond No.5. “Let’s see where the wind takes us,” Brosnan, 71, tantalisingly tells Review. What does he think about Amazon taking over? “I wish them all well,” he says. How does he look back on GoldenEye after three decades? “With love,” he responds. One gets the distinct impression he really does not want to talk about Bond, James Bond. What a pity.
He will always be the renegade spy, following Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, but his career is indeed much more varied. He has turned in great performances in other genres: action, thrillers, comedies, musicals, westerns, romances and also superhero and fantasy films – everything.
Now, Brosnan plays Conrad Harrigan, the patriarch of a mafia family at war with rivals in the London criminal underworld in MobLand. Having watched the first two episodes of the series, it is compelling with Brosnan striking as a tough, menacing, even frightening, bad guy. Brosnan says he enjoys playing bad guys.
“The script came to me last summer,” he says. “The show was actually called The Donovans back then. I read the first five episodes. I enjoyed them. I enjoyed the writing. And I said yes, on the phone, to Guy Ritchie.”
“What attracted me was the writing and then Jez Butterworth came on board. He is a great writer, so the combination of these wonderful playwrights, screenwriters, and to come back to London and be with my family, to play this mad, mangled, psychopathic war crime boss.”
MobLand is made by a team that includes Ritchie, no stranger to the genre, who serves as executive producer and writer/director of several episodes.
It also stars Tom Hardy as the family fix-it man Harry Da Souza, Helen Mirren as Harrigan’s equally sinister wife Maeve, Paddy Considine as son Kevin, Joanne Froggatt as Harry’s wife Jan and Geoff Bell as Harrigan’s nemesis, Richie, who runs the rival Stevenson criminal outfit.
“Helen and I worked together on another film last year called the Thursday Murder Club and, in actual fact, Helen and I worked on a film many, many moons ago called The Long Good Friday (1980),” Brosnan recalls. “I was in it for a blip and that was the first time we were on screen together, so to speak. Tom, I’d never worked with. Both are exceptional actors, great people, lovely people, kind people, fascinating, mysterious, brilliant, human, real. They become friends.”
This is not Brosnan’s first series. Remington Steele (1982-87) was his breakout role. It caught the eye of legendary Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. He was offered the role of 007 when Moore departed but the series was renewed for another season which meant he had to stand aside. It went to Dalton. When offered the role a second time, he accepted, again. Brosnan was more recently in another series, The Son (2017-19).
In this new golden era of television, longer-form storytelling offers actors a chance to deep dive into a character, which Brosnan says was part of the appeal of MobLand.
“You have the time to investigate the characters and the relationships over, in this case, 10 episodes,” he explains.
“So, from an actor’s point of view, you have time. But in the same breath, this particular production went like the wind, so you jump on for the ride. You’re never quite sure where the story is going because they are such a nest of vipers, this family, the Harrigans, we are a business family and we deal in heroin and fentanyl and guns and that whole underbelly of gangland, and so people can disappear very easily.”
Brosnan probably does not get enough credit for the diversity of roles he has had in film. Consider the character of Stu Dunmeyer in Mrs Doubtfire (1993) alongside Robin Williams and Sally Field. Or volcanologist Harry Dalton in Dante’s Peak (1997). He had the title role in the heist film, The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), alongside Rene Russo. The Tailor of Panama (2001) saw him as Andy Osnard in the John le Carré espionage story.
He earned a Golden Globe nomination for The Matador (2005), a black comedy with Greg Kinnear. He was terrific as former prime minister Adam Lang in the Roman Polanski-directed film, The Ghost Writer (2010). Then there are roles in Percy Jackson & the Olympians (2010) and Black Adam (2022). Who could forget the all-dancing, all-singing musical Mamma Mia! (2008) and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), not loved by critics but a box office smash.
“I enjoy acting,” Brosnan says. “I enjoy playing good guys, bad guys. I was trained as an actor to play right across the stage.”
He looks for roles that stretch him as an actor, drawing on skills learnt at drama school in the 1960s and ’70s but also continuing to grow and evolve, absorbing techniques from other actors and looking for opportunities to try new things. The secret, he says, is to look for “great writing” and to “align oneself with great actors and great directors”.
Two of the earliest films Brosnan saw at the cinema were Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Goldfinger (1964), which captured his imagination and planted an idea that he could, perhaps, be an actor on stage, television and cinema screens. The Irish-born Brosnan initially wanted to be an artist and so trained as an illustrator at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London after finishing high school.
“I left school with nothing more than a cardboard folder of drawings and paintings,” he remembers. “I got a job as a trainee commercial artist but the movies always intrigued me and fascinated me and captivated me, and I had some crazy notion or dream of being up on the screen, but I never pursued it.”
While working commercially at Ravenna Studios, a friend suggested he come along to a workshop at the Ovalhouse Theatre in South London. It was 1968 or 1969, Brosnan recalls.
“I went along and that was it; my world changed,” he continues. “There was dance, there was mime, it was at the height of the ’60s music, culture and the landscape of theatre. So, I gave up my job and I joined a theatre company and travelled around Paris and Amsterdam. I did that for three years. Then I went to the Drama Centre in London, trained for three years.”
“Once I found acting, you know, that was it – that was my passion. I just loved it. I wasn’t driven by the money. I was driven by the creativity, the passion, the soul searching. It was an exploration of myself on every journey that I took. It still remains that because you are always dealing with constructing and destroying, so to speak, your own self within, trying to be someone else and it entices me and captivates me and turns me on to this day and ultimately, hopefully, will the audience as well.”
But, for all the accolades in a long and successful acting career, and having been the iconic secret agent, there is one honour that few can claim: being named People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (2001). Brosnan laughs when I bring it up.
“I take it all with a pinch of salt,” he says at first, seemingly dismissing it. Then he leans forward with a smile and twinkle in his eye. “Us sexy men, we come and we go,” he says. “It’s lovely. It’s a celebration of one’s work.”
MobLand is streaming on Paramount+.
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