How Pierce Brosnan found his niche in Hollywood: “There was a deep wish and desire”
One of the definitions of longevity is remaining popular or useful for a long time, and Pierce Brosnan certainly ticks both those boxes.
Now well into his fifth decade of acting onscreen, Brosnan has pretty much done it all: international spy, Abba enthusiast, IRA operative, Mrs Doubtfire’s punching bag, and the last few years have been some of his most fruitful yet.
He’s about to be seen as an elderly amateur detective in the Thursday Murder Club on Netflix, and he recently showed a worryingly vicious side alongside Tom Hardy in Guy Ritchie’s massively successful Mob Land, while also playing a brilliantly corrupt secret service head in Steven Soderbergh’s slick thriller Black Bag.
For a long time, Brosnan was somewhat typecast as simply a very handsome straight man, and while he embraced the big leagues and the idea of following in the footsteps of his screen heroes, originally, he simply wanted to earn a living from his trade. But the ambition that took him from humble initial beginnings to an A-lister was clear, as he outlined to The Rake: “As much as I loved the romanticism of doing movies, the practicality was that I wanted to be a working actor and I wanted to work and build a career, I wanted to have greatness, or moments close to greatness.”
It was a long and storied journey for Brosnan from his upbringing in rural Ireland to the bright and glamorous world of Hollywood in the 1980s. He made the trip from Ireland to London a decade prior to find his fame, attending drama school for three years and then beginning a career on stage. It was while working in theatre that he got the call from the US networks and took the lead in a highly successful network crime thriller called Remington Steele.
He spent five years working on that show for NBC, and it was a ratings smash. His suaveness and good looks enraptured the housewives of America, a success that eventually led him to be in the discussion when the Broccoli family were looking for a new James Bond. Although he was cast as far back as 1987, he wasn’t able to take up the role due to filming commitments, and so Timothy Dalton stepped in for two movies.
But when Brosnan did pick up the role of 007, he did so to almost universal acclaim, with his four Bond movies grossing over a billion at the box office, and critics praising his performance as the famed spy. Although he wanted to do another two movies to take his total to six, Brosnan was given the boot in favour of Daniel Craig for Casino Royale in 2006.
Over the years, the Irishman has suffered huge setbacks, especially on the personal font with the death of his first wife, Cassandra Harris, at the peak of his TV fame in 1991, and again when his adopted daughter tragically died.
Regardless, he continued to work consistently each year, saying, “I wanted to be a commercial actor with some longevity, I wanted the world of Warren Beatty, Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, leading-man romantic hero; yes, I had all those emblems in my head. The movies—I thought this would never come to pass, or living here in America, but I guess there was a deep wish and desire beneath my workmanlike attitude for the job.”
Aside from the aforementioned upcoming projects, Brosnan will also soon be seen in the sports biopic Giant, playing Brendan Ingle, the trainer of Yorkshire-born boxing legend Prince Naseem Hamed, who thrilled boxing fans the world over in the late 1990s with his extravagant fighting style and exuberant ringmanship.
As far as boxing films go, it should have the requisite quality, given Rocky legend Sylvester Stallone is acting as an executive producer for the project.
