Thirty years ago, Pierce Brosnan announced himself as 007 with a dizzying jump from a vast, vertiginous concrete dam in one of the best openings to one of the best Bonds, GoldenEye. The 72-year-old makes a slightly more relaxed entrance today, but he’s every bit as unruffled as the suave super spy. A sharply cut navy blue suit. A lustrous, swooping grey mane. He strolls into the room with the composure of a man who knows exactly how to occupy a space without crowding it.
Back in 1995, he was joining a franchise born of the international success of a famous series of novels. So too now, as he arrives on our screens in The Thursday Murder Club, adapted from the first of Richard Osman’s bestselling blue-rinse detective stories. They’re a crime-fiction phenomenon: four OAP sleuths, astronomical sales and, inevitably, grumblings about their cosy, middle-class view of Britain. Too sanitised by half, some have said. That, Brosnan responds, “is a lot of hogwash”.
The first novel, published in 2020, is set in an upmarket retirement village in the fictional Kentish town of Fairhaven. Four of its residents have formed a “murder club” that meets once a week to delve into unsolved cases from the past. Then someone is killed on their doorstep, and they turn their attention to solving the clues right under their noses.
Of course, it’s the whiff of well-heeled privilege that gets some people’s goat. “I think that’s a little ill directed,” Brosnan sighs, in his elegant Irish burr. “I mean, it’s entertainment, and you want to be dazzled. You want to transport people, and you want them to come away with a wonderful sense of ‘I want to be there when I’m old. I want to grow old like this.’”
Osman based it on the retirement village where his mother Brenda lives, observing on visits that “as an Agatha Christie fan, this would be an amazing place for a murder”. The film doubles down and makes it even more upscale, with pretty Aldbury in Hertfordshire standing in for Fairhaven, and the stately Elizabethan manor of Englefield House in Berkshire doubling as Osman’s retirement village, Coopers Chase.
The star power on screen, too, shows just how certain the producers are that audiences will want to see Osman’s story brought to life. The murder club members are played by Helen Mirren (as former spy Elizabeth Best); Ben Kingsley (as retired psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif); Celia Imrie (as ex-nurse Joyce Meadowcroft); and Brosnan (as former union leader Ron Ritchie, a West Ham fanatic).
The film also locks on to a trend for golden oldie drama that has produced some big hits over the past decade and a half, from TV’s Last Tango in Halifax to the 2011 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Brosnan is very comfortable with his own advancing age. “I have become [an OAP],” he says. “One grows into one’s years, and that is a gift in itself. It’s wonderful at the age of 72 to have had a career and to still find employment.” He had a “glorious summer” making the movie, he tells me.
He also got a huge kick out of playing “Red Ron” (although he’s shaved off the beard that he grew for the part). “Ron and I are joined at the hip in some respects,” he argues. “He has gone out into the trenches fighting for the cause. As an actor, I’ve gone out and done the same in the world of environmental activism. I know what it’s like to go up against ‘the man’, to protest, to be part of the endeavour to do well by your fellow man, your environment, whether it be oceans or old-growth trees.”
When I press for more on this, Brosnan tells me to google him, and calls out millennials like me and the Gen Z cohort that has followed. He’s backed up by every news report of eightysomethings being arrested in Gaza demonstrations.
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“This generation is not protesting enough. It seems to have kind of lost a voice for speaking out against what is happening, whether it be in politics or the environment, or life. But the restrictions now are quite severe. You can feel the manacle of power. But nevertheless, I think, if one keeps hope and faith alive, that the pendulum will swing back to an equilibrium of dignity and compassion for each other.”
Underpinning this belief in fighting for a better world is a steely core. Brosnan made it without privilege smoothing a path for him. Acting liberated him from a childhood filled with adversity. Born in Drogheda on the east coast of Ireland, 30 miles up from Dublin, he spent the majority of his early years with his grandparents in nearby Navan, after his father abandoned the family when he was still an infant. His mother left for England as an economic migrant to build a new life as a nurse, then remarried and brought her son to join her just before his teenage years.
Life in Navan was “fairly solitary”, he later recalled, but his roots remain important to him; his experience of London was of being bullied at school and learning to hold his own, yet there was a price to pay. “I left school at 15 feeling fairly useless and not really up to scratch in my education,” he told The Independent in 2006.
He thought of becoming a commercial artist (“I love art; I’m a painter,” he tells me), but acting offered another way forward. And his resilience served him well as he struggled through the ranks in regional theatre, then film and TV bit parts: “Last Victim” in Hammer House of Horror, for instance, and “First Irishman” in The Long Good Friday, where he memorably cruises one of Bob Hoskins’s underlings at a swimming pool before stabbing him in the ribs. Electing to try his hand in the USA, he used his dreamboat looks and debonair manner to win the title role (well, sort of, it’s complicated) in 94 episodes of the high-concept detective series Remington Steele between 1982 and 1987.
The show put him in the running to play Bond, but he couldn’t escape his contract in order to take over from Roger Moore in 1986. That time, Timothy Dalton stepped in, but when the franchise rebooted in 1995 after a tedious six-year legal dispute, its producers took advantage of Dalton’s contract having lapsed to install the younger man. It paid off.
Since they’d run out of Ian Fleming books to adapt, the Bond films had been slowly dying on the vine. Brosnan and GoldenEye breathed vivid new life into the franchise – much in the way that Casino Royale did with Daniel Craig – and the same will be needed again in the death-of-Bond era. Ricky Gervais joked in a tweet about taking on the role himself – a notion Brosnan toys with as worth exploring, especially since “you have to be tough as old boots to play the role, because not everyone is going to be happy with you”.
Brosnan starred in four outings, with Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002) following GoldenEye, before he was ruthlessly replaced himself, at 52, by Craig. He seems to bear no grudges about this at all (“Daniel was a magnificent, brilliant James Bond, monumental James Bond”).
It wasn’t an endpoint for Brosnan, though. His self-aware performance in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, released in the months before his penultimate outing as Bond, has aged beautifully with its knowing twinkle. (He hasn’t seen it since the premiere, but really should.) It pointed the way to a classy post-007 career that has included well-regarded indies such as The Matador (2005) and The Ghost (2010), blockbusters like Mamma Mia (2008) and its 2018 sequel, and this year’s hit Guy Ritchie gangster series MobLand – even if the latter landed Brosnan with a viral roasting for his Kerry accent. He’d been intending to play the character as a south Londoner, he tells me, when he showed up for work, and bang – “On the day, [Guy] said, ‘No, go Irish.’” He had 20 minutes.
“My Irish accent is very soft and subtle, and the Kerry accent is a very strong accent,” he says, “so I called up my dialect coach, Brendan Gunn, who’s a great man, artist, lives in Belfast. And I said, give me a Kerry accent. And he said, well, check this guy out on YouTube.” It had an emotional resonance for him – “My old man, Tom Brosnan, who I never knew, he was from Kerry. So there was some kind of intuition, gut instinct, and I just leapt off straight into this Kerry accent.”
He was tempted to join The Thursday Murder Club, meanwhile, by an old pal, director Chris Columbus, who had first cast him in Mrs Doubtfire – on which he remembers his surreal first meeting with Robin Williams (“he had a Hawaiian shirt on and cargo pants, hairy arms, hairy legs and the head of Mrs Doubtfire”) – then later in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. It’s entirely possible that Columbus and Brosnan could be on the brink of another long-running franchise. Osman’s series reaches novel number five with the release of The Impossible Fortune in September.
I can’t help feeling, though, that he’s owed another Bond. I’d love to see an entry in the series that was like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a septuagenarian 007. Could he be the surprise package the franchise needs? “Well, that’s a good question,” he says. “Richard Osman was saying the same thing, ironically, this morning, and I don’t know Richard that well, but he waxed lyrical about my being an older Bond.” It sounds as if he likes the idea… “It’s very possible,” he says with a smile. “They know where to find me.”
‘The Thursday Murder Club’ is streaming on Netflix
