The two movies that blew Pierce Brosnan away: “I’d never seen anything like either one”
Life-changing, eye-opening, and transformative moments can happen at different ages for different people. For Pierce Brosnan, it came the very first time he visited a cinema outside of his native Ireland.
It wasn’t his first trip to the movies, though, but it was the one that forever altered the course of his life. That comes across as somewhat hyperbolic, considering he would have only been around 11 years old at the time, but it’s also impossible to dispute looking at what came in the years to follow.
Brosnan may have been the fifth actor to play James Bond after Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, and Timothy Dalton, but it’s a famous piece of franchise folklore that if things had gone to plan, he would have been the fourth and stepped into the tux in the mid-1980s.
After his TV series Remington Steele was cancelled, Brosnan was offered one of the industry’s most coveted parts in The Living Daylights. However, when the network decided to reverse its decision and bring the show back for one final run, contractual obligations ruled him out, and Dalton ended up as 007.
Two decades before Remington Steele and three before he finally made his debut as Bond in GoldenEye, Brosnan had his socks knocked clean off by one of his predecessors, not that he could have ever imagined at the time that he’d be following in their footsteps one day.
“I saw Goldfinger one weekend and Lawrence of Arabia the next,” he recalled to Alex Simon of his first time hitting the multiplex in London. “So the seed was sown for the movies because I’d never seen anything like either one. I was just blown away. I was used to two little cinemas that showed black-and-white movies.”
In a sign of what lay in his future, the suave secret agent, the action sequences, the gadgets, and the girls seemed to speak to him more than David Lean’s staggering period piece, which makes a lot of sense when Brosnan has always had a habit of looking the part in a well-tailored ensemble.
“It was Oddjob that captured my imagination in that film, he and Shirley Eaton, covered in gold paint,” the star explained. “And the fight sequence at the end in Fort Knox, where all the money in the world was. The gold bars. The music. It was just kind of visceral. You could feel it. I was hooked on movies ever since.”
It’s one of those serendipitous coincidences no screenwriter in Hollywood could concoct; Brosnan’s infatuation with cinema began when he saw Bond strutting his stuff on the silver screen, and 30 years later, he was the one playing the character.
