It is a weekday morning and I am standing beside Pierce Brosnan on a deserted backstreet, watching a woman in a hairnet and white wellies hosing down
It is a weekday morning and I am standing beside Pierce Brosnan on a deserted backstreet, watching a woman in a hairnet and white wellies hosing down the entrance to a fishmarket. The former James Bond is in full flow. “You know the scene in MobLand where I’ve got my foot on that guy’s throat and Tom Hardy is shooting the shit out of everyone?” He is talking in his opulent, buttery burr about the recent series in which he and Helen Mirren play the heads of an Irish crime family. “We shot that right here!” He waves at the woman, who silences her hose temporarily. “Hi, hello,” he calls out. “I shot a television show here called MobLand.” She smiles back at him. “Yes,” she replies sweetly, as though indulging a confused uncle. “No idea, has she?” he chuckles. The hose springs back to life with a hiss.
Brosnan, 72, was raised in Navan, County Meath but is now generally to be found at one of his homes in Hawaii or Malibu, and is in London for the release of The Thursday Murder Club, the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime bestseller. Brosnan teams up with Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as retirement-home sleuths whose weekly divertissement solving historical icy cases turns earnest when fresh corpses start popping up. Today, he has agreed to a one-off meeting of the Wednesday Nostalgia Club, strolling around the area of north London where he cut his teeth and earned his stripes. “Down the lane of memory,” he says cheerily.
At the fishmonger’s where Brosnan shot a fight scene in the gangster series MobLand. Photograph: Jamie Salmons/The Guardian
Our first port of call is Camden Arts Projects, the Grade II-listed former Methodist church that was once the site of Drama Centre London. It is now an exhibiton and screening space , but inside Brosnan finds the same stage where he auditioned successfully more than half a century ago. He strides on to it and gazes around the huge white hall, peering up at the empty balconies as though picturing the ghosts of audiences past. “Coming here was the making of me,” he says.
His snowy hair is swept back, and he looks slick and tanned. In 1973, the year of his audition, he cut a very different figure: shoulder-length locks, goatee, earring. When he arrived at theDrama Centre, he already had several years’ experience of experimental theatre at the Ovalhouse theatre, now Brixton House, in Kennington. That spell on the fringes informed his performance in The Thursday Murder Club as “Red” Ron, a former trade unionist. “I recognised Ron because of my days in street theatre and agitprop. Theatre companies performing outside the Ford factory, all that stuff.”
What he lacked was formal training. He auditioned first for Webber Douglas, another drama school. “I was so nervous, I fell off the stage. When I got to the Drama Centre, I thought: ‘Pay attention, Brosnan.’” Armed with a soliloquy from Macbeth, he impressed the centre’s co-founder, Christopher Fettes, who became his teacher and mentor. Fettes, who died last year at 94, once said it was “shocking” that Brosnan left the stage behind for cinema. Then again, he also considered James Bond to be “a bit below” Brosnan’s talents.
‘Broody Brosnan’ … Circa 1978, shortly after Tennessee Williams boosted him from understudy to a role in The Red Devil Battery Sign at the Roundhouse. Photograph: Jeremy Fletcher/Redferns
The actor concedes the first point. “Christopher wanted me doing obscure 19th-century plays, but my dream was always movies.” Daniel Craig, Brosnan’s immediate successor as 007, made a point of returning to theatre. “I was impressed that Daniel had the bottle to go back out there. I thought, ‘Why the heck didn’t I?’ You have to really want it, and I didn’t.”
Was Fettes right about Bond being beneath him? “It’s very kind of Christopher. But thank God for Bond. It’s given me longevity. It’s given me the world in many respects.” As if to prove his point, he steps outside into the morning lightweight and dons his spiffy Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses. “I didn’t pay for these. They were free. My son said: ‘Oh my God, Dad. They start at 700 bucks.’”
On opening night, he sent me a telegram: ‘Thank God for you, my dear boy. Love, Tennessee Williams
Brosnan played Bond four times, beginning with the impressive GoldenEye in 1995 and ending seven years later with the risible Die Another Day. He had a unique challenge: his incarnation was the first to be asked to reckon with the chauvinistic sins of Bonds gone by. He had to uphold the character’s heroism in between occasional bites of humble pie.
Bond had figured in Brosnan’s life here and there before he got to play him. There was a cinema trip with his stepfather to see Goldfinger at the ABC Putney in September 1964. The previous month, 11-year-old Brosnan was reunited with his mother after living with relatives in Ireland while she completed her nursing training in London. “I later discovered that Ian Fleming died in August, the same month I got here.” He raises both eyebrows in a manner that wouldn’t have disgraced Roger Moore. When Moore vacated the role in the behind schedule 1980s, it was Brosnan’s for the taking. Except the network behind his US television hit Remington Steele, in which he was charming as a conman turned detective, refused to release him from his contract. His loss was Timothy Dalton’s gain, at least for a few years.
Our next stop is the Roundhouse, the live music venue and former theatre where Brosnan starred in the British premiere of Tennessee Williams’ The Red Devil Battery Sign in June 1977. The playwright personally promoted Brosnan, originally an understudy, to the main cast. “On opening night, he sent me a telegram: ‘Thank God for you, my dear boy. Love, Tennessee Williams.’” It must have made up for having his name misspelt on the posters as “Pierce Brosman”, I suggest. He responds with a rueful laugh.
Time out in Camden en route to the Roundhouse. Photograph: Jamie Salmons/The Guardian
The security guard at the Roundhouse looks unfazed when I tell him who I have with me, but permits us to nose around anyway. “I remember finishing the show one night and bumping into Tennessee,” says Brosnan as we loiter in the foyer. “He couldn’t find his way out of the theatre, so he held my arm and I walked him to his driver.” Williams died six years later at 71. “Well, he liked a tipple. You would go to his house at night and everyone would be at his feet while he regaled us with these lyrical stories.” A pause. “None of which I can recall because I was tippling, too.”
The Red Devil Battery Sign opened exactly a week after the release of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen. “Punk wasn’t my bailiwick,” he says. “Pink Floyd were part of my landscape of learning and transformation. I was a hippy.” Around his neck is a string of beads which may or may not be the ones given to him by a monk 15 years ago during a nasty bit of turbulence on a private plane.
To finish our conversation, we head to a pavement cafe in nearby Primrose Hill, where Brosnan admires the dogs trotting by. This prompts a brief reverie on his favourite Instagram video. “It’s a guy who dresses his dog in a hoodie and then puts his own hands through the sleeves, so it looks like the dog has hands.” He sips his latte. “It’s really quite brilliant.”
A scene from The Thursday Murder Club, from left: Celia Imrie, Helen Mirren, Naomi Ackie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley. Photograph: AP
We get back to the topic of The Thursday Murder Club. Brosnan still isn’t sure why Chris Columbus, who directed him in Mrs Doubtfire and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, thought of him for Ron. “Chris just said: ‘Grow a beard.’ So I did.”
Columbus isn’t the only blast from Brosnan’s past in the novel movie. Decades before MobLand, he and Mirren appeared in The Long Good Friday, though they didn’t share any scenes. Whereas Brosnan and Paul Freeman, who stars in The Thursday Murder Club as a vet whose wife is dying, have got “previous” – as the East End hoods of that 1980 thriller would put it. “It was my first film,” Brosnan sighs. “I wasn’t given a script. My agent said: ‘Get down to Lewisham bath and take your trunks.’ And there was Paul.” The Thursday Murder Club brings them together for the first time since Brosnan had the temerity to stab Freeman to death in the swimming baths. It also puts Brosnan back in his trunks again for a water aerobics workout to Disco Inferno. “Some people think I give one of my best performances in The Long Good Friday,” he muses. Because he doesn’t have any lines? “Exactly! Don’t give me any lines. Just tell me: look camera left, look camera right.” And brood. “Yes. That’s me. Broody Brosnan.”
Brosnan in full flight as James Bond in Die Another Day, 2002. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Possibly Brosnan’s smartest moves during his Bond tenure were to make canny choices between 007 films. He had his head detached from his body in Mars Attacks! and kissed Sarah Jessica Parker, who had had hers attached to a chihuahua. Then he flashed his bum and got doused in champagne by Rene Russo in the clever, snazzy remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, and was gleefully untrustworthy as a crooked MI6 agent in The Tailor of Panama. (The behind schedule Observer film critic Philip French considered Brosnan “better at coarse, sleazy charm than suave sophistication”.) This meant he had less baggage to shake off after Die Another Day. The world already knew he was more than just a walking tuxedo. Very clever, Mr Bond.
In fact, it’s one of Brosnan’s tips for whoever plays the role next. “It’s essential to be creative outside of Bond,” he says. Any other advice? “Get a good lawyer.”
His eclecticism has continued, whether it means painting his toenails as a gone-to-seed hitman in The Matador, belting his lungs out in Mamma Mia! or returning to the intelligence agencies, as boss rather than foot-soldier in Steven Soderbergh’s witty thriller Black Bag, in which he barked at Michael Fassbender and sparked with Cate Blanchett.
Last stop of the day at a cafe in Primrose Hill. Photograph: Jamie Salmons/The Guardian
Talking of which, wasn’t Blanchett astonishing, he says, in the recent production of The Seagull at the Barbican? “I was bedazzled! The friend I was with said, ‘You’ve got to go round and congratulate her. She’ll know you’re in.’ So we joined the queue. Barricades, the lot. The guy on the door said: ‘Are you on the list?’ My friend said: ‘This is Pierce Brosnan!’ There were tourists snapping away, taking my picture. ‘Sorry, mate. Not on the list. Can’t come in.’ My friend was getting indignant. I said: ‘Walk away.’ I sent Cate a note instead. She was mortified.”
Security guards and fishmongers alike may not recognise him. But once Brosnan has been whisked off to his next appointment, a family of American tourists call out to me as I’m paying the bill: “Was that Pierce Brosnan? Wow!” Proof that his star hasn’t dimmed. If only he’d been there to get the benefit.
The Thursday Murder Club is streaming on Netflix
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