The musician Pierce Brosnan always dreamed of playing: “He’s been taken”
Let’s face it, no matter what your persuasion, Pierce Brosnan is, and pretty much has always been, about as hot as they come, and it doesn’t matter if he’s James Bond, or Thomas Crown, or the horrible older boss in Black Bag, as the guy just exudes sex appeal.
Now imagine in him any of those roles, and he starts singing in dulcet tones to you? All bets are off at that point.
Brosnan is having something of an Indian summer with his career at the moment, thanks to a succession of roles including Steven Soderbergh’s aforementioned stylish thriller, Guy Ritchie’s gangster hit Mob Land, and now Giant, a boxing biopic based on the life of Sheffield fighter Prince Naseem Hamed.
The Irish actor plays Hamed’s trainer, Brendan Ingle, in the film and had to don hours worth of prosthetics in order to do it as convincingly as possible, and yet he still manages to look attractive (just me? OK). Brosnan, and indeed the film in general, is getting some decent reviews for the movie, which is out in the UK at the end of this week.
But back to the singing, about which of course wine-clutching mums everywhere know him just as well for the two Abba-based showstoppers he made in 2008 and 2018, Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!, in which he belted out finely crafted Swedish pop with the best of them. Both movies were absolutely massive hits for Brosnan and the all-star casts, including Meryl Streep, Colin Firth and Amanda Seyfried, but perhaps sadly they didn’t lead to him receiving a load of offers to do more musical stuff.
The first film did very well with the critics and earned two Golden Globe nominations, but Brosnan also picked up a Golden Raspberry nomination for ‘Worst Supporting Actor’, which seems a little unfair.
Asked by the NME if he’d ever been offered to play a musician in a biopic, Dewey Cox-style, Brosnan lamented, “No, Mamma Mia!‘s the closest I’ve got to singing and I love it. I did get a platinum album for my singing, you know, so fuck the begrudgers! I got to sing with Meryl Streep! It was the last thing I expected, but I kind of got it. I understood the joke, the karaoke of it all. They didn’t employ me for my singing, but I loved it anyway. I don’t have any desire to play anyone in particular. I mean Elvis, but he’s been taken, beautifully so.”
Much as that sounds slightly wrong, the biopic of which dear Pierce speaks is, of course, the 2022 Baz Luhrmann movie Elvis, in which the peanut butter and banana-loving, karate-chopping music legend was played in some style by a young Austin Butler. That film would go on to earn a staggering eight Oscar nominations and make a world star out of Butler, who won the Golden Globe the following year for ‘Best Actor’.
Brosnan meanwhile, who is somehow now 72 years of age, will being doing more Mob Land this year in addition to no doubt reprising his role in the Thursday Murder Club films at some point, which is based on the books which are read and enjoyed by the kind of people who get excited at the prospect of Charlie Bigham launching a new range of Shepherd’s Pie meals in Waitrose.
He’ll also be appearing in this year’s update of the Stallone movie Cliffhanger, which, honestly, from the sounds of it, might well be terrible.
