Pierce Brosnan's 11 most memorable movie roles

Irish Times

14 hours ago

Pierce Brosnan
, self-identified
Navan
man, will have known, when he signed on for
James Bond
in 1995, that the role would follow him for the rest of his career. It happened to
Sean Connery
. It happened to
Roger Moore
. On the rare occasions George Lazenby enters a conversation, his role in On Her Majesty's Secret Service is inevitably chewed over. Oh, well. There are worse things.
That reduction to 'Bond actor' distracts from a busier and better CV than the casual observer might guess, however. Brosnan is back this month as a Dubliner who leaves the Civil Service to paint rain-blasted beaches in a tweedy adaptation of Niall Williams's novel Four Letters of Love.
In August you can see him opposite
Helen Mirren
,
Ben Kingsley
and Celia Imrie as the retired union leader Ron Ritchie in
Netflix's
take on
Richard Osman's
hugely popular cosy-crime yarn The
Thursday Murder Club
.
The raised eyes at that last casting – Osmaniacs favoured the likes of Ray Winstone – confirm how people still expect him to stay within the Bond guardrails: debonair, clipped, sophisticated.
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Maybe that is what he does best: variations on and pastiches of the suave casino dweller. Why should he not? Cary Grant was always Cary Grant. There are a few deviations from the Brosnan Type below, but, even there, the sense of who he once was – or pretended to be – remains watermarked into the performance.
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To avoid Bond overload, we have gone with Brosnan's 11 most memorable movie roles rather than his 11 best films.
11. Mark Taffin in Taffin
Directed by Francis Megahy, 1988
Brosnan is too much of a gent for us to play games with a worst-performances list. If we did, Taffin probably wouldn't be on it anyway. This bizarre action flick transcends all traditional notions of quality. Brosnan, then just emerging from Remington Steele on TV, but not yet signed up to Bond, returned home to play a hardman – the sort Steven Seagal was just beginning to portray – in an Irish action thriller heavy with tasty quips. It's not exactly a good film. Brosnan's not exactly good in it. But there is no denying the cult that has gathered around the thing. Fans know this script backwards.
10. First Irishman in The Long Good Friday
Directed by John Mackenzie, 1980
Okay, he is barely in it. But Brosnan's tiny role as an
IRA
operative – the actor's first in a feature film – is notable for one of the greatest closing scenes from any gangster flick. Bob Hoskins's ambitious hoodlum, leaving the Savoy grill, realises someone unexpected is in the passenger seat of his chauffeured limousine. It is our man Brosnan, and he has a pistol pointed at the geezer's head. The resigned smile that spreads over Hoskins's face as he accepts his doom never fails to chill the bones. Years later we yelled: 'Hey, that was James Bond!' The film itself is a masterpiece.
9. Sam Carmichael in Mamma Mia!
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, 2008
Another controversial one. You wouldn't say what Brosnan was doing counted as singing – his notorious rendition of SOS is atonal to an avant-garde degree – but nobody else could pull off that boyish charm. Complemented perfectly by his rival dads Stellan Skarsgard and
Colin Firth
, neither of whom will be confused with Enrico Caruso either. Yes,
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
is a much better film, but Brosnan doesn't have quite so much to do there. (Anyone who says 'just as well' is forbidden from reading the rest of this article.)
8. Stuart 'Stu' Dunmeyer in Mrs Doubtfire
Directed by Chris Columbus, 1993
Inspired casting from
Chris Columbus
. Who is the last person a self-absorbed jealous nut would want his estranged wife to be dating? Why, the smoothest, most charming man ever to emerge from
Co Meath
(by way of
Louth
). The selection seemed all the wiser when, two years later, Brosnan took over the most glamorous espionage franchise in the business. A reminder the Irishman has a perfect understanding of how a comic foil needs to position himself. 'I kept to my text and he just danced around it,' he later said approvingly of
Robin Williams's
famous drag turn.
7. Arthur Stieglitz in Black Bag
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Something was bugging me – in a good way – about Brosnan's performance as an MI6 bigwig in
Steven Soderbergh's
superbly icy
espionage thriller
. On the way out of the press screening a colleague solved the mystery for me. 'He's doing
King Charles
, isn't he?' He does indeed seem to be riffing the current British monarch, and it's an inspired decision. There is that same sense of a man so used to privilege he makes little attempt at ingratiation. 'Quite malevolent in his own way,' Brosnan said of a character (Stieglitz, not the king) who James Bond may have eventually become.
6. Andy Osnard in The Tailor of Panama
Directed by John Boorman, 2001
John le Carré
was, from his emergence with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in 1963, always pitched as the rough antidote to Ian Fleming's imperial fantasies. Brosnan was not the first Bond actor to lead a le Carré adaptation: Sean Connery did rugged work in Fred Schepisi's The Russia House, from 1990. But Brosnan was still (just) in the
007
job when he played an MI6 agent abroad for Boorman, and, crucially, the rollicking film – essentially a comedy – seems more committed to deconstructing Fleming's absurd mythologies. An underrated film and performance.
5. Prof Donald Kessler in Mars Attacks!
Directed by Tim Burton, 1996
In one of the more unhinged holidays from Bond in that franchise's history – Connery was not still in the job when he made Boorman's Zardoz – Brosnan, with white coat and teeth-clenched pipe, has magnificent fun as a variation on the sharp boffin who turns up to explain imminent threat in science-fiction flicks of the 1950s. The indignities he suffers after the Martians attack scarcely bear thinking about. Apparently, the role was originally intended for
Hugh Grant
, but he doesn't quite have the straightness of back that Brosnan manages. Just hilarious.
4. Adam Lang in The Ghost
Directed by Roman Polanski, 2010
So for which postwar British prime minister might the smooth Brosnan be best suited. Harold Wilson? Hardly. Ted Heath? Even less likely. No, Adam Lang, in this
gripping adaptation of a Robert Hughes book
(titled The Ghost Writer in the US), is, of course, a variation on
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair
. 'Am I playing Blair?' he said to me at the time. 'I found it quite humorous that an Irishman was playing a British ex-prime minister. But you could say the same about Bond.' It's an immaculate turn in a film that has much to say about how the UK grovelled (and maybe still does) to its ally across the Atlantic.
3. Julian Noble in The Matador
Directed by Richard Shepard, 2005
If anybody had got the mistaken idea that Brosnan takes himself too seriously, they were surely disabused by the scene in The Matador in which, to the sounds of The Cramps' Garbageman, he sashays through a crowded hotel lobby in only black underpants, ankle boots and sunglasses. The hugely enjoyable comedy thriller, featuring our man as a psychologically frayed assassin, won the star endless accolades and a Golden Globe nomination.
Roger Ebert
called The Matador his best work to date. We don't quite agree (see below), but it confirmed that he had an immaculate understanding of what the camera demands.
2. James Bond in Goldeneye
Directed by Martin Campbell, 1995
And here we are. Like Roger Moore, Brosnan had been courted for an earlier induction into the Bond franchise but got waylaid by TV commitments. He finally got the gig just past the age of 40 – and, moving away from Timothy Dalton's tougher 007, reinstituted a little of Moore's comic lounge-lizard suaveness without slipping into the broad comedy of decadent outings such as Octopussy and A View to a Kill.
Judi Dench's
M, so good she alone survived into the
Daniel Craig
reboot, famously summed up this incarnation as a 'sexist, misogynist dinosaur'. He would hardly be James Bond if he were not those things. Brosnan returned to 007 three times, but his first outing remained his best.
1. Thomas Crown in The Thomas Crown Affair
Directed by John McTiernan, 1999
An immaculate entertainment that, though it received only lukewarm reviews on release, is now firmly installed as one of the great Hollywood remakes. If one were feeling pompous one could read John McTiernan's heist flick as an essay on the unknowability of the dinner-jacketed wraith Brosnan so often plays. Rene Russo, equally good as the insurance investigator seeking to trip up his bored billionaire, never breaks the glossy carapace. Brosnan seems, however, aware there may be little worth discovering about this cipher who rose from nothing to become a different kind of nothing. Norman Jewison's 1968 original with
Steve McQueen
, though still a bank holiday staple, seemed deadened by its own icy style and held back by McQueen's self-importance. Russo and Brosnan, in contrast, seem to know they are in something close to a comedy. Gorgeous romantic set pieces. Thrilling action sequences. Great use of Nina Simone's Sinner Man.
Bubbling under:
As oddly familiar Irish republican antagonist to Jackie Chan in
The Foreigner
(2017). Weathering Barbra Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). In Africa for Bruce Beresford in Mister Johnson (1990). Standing up to a volcano in Dante's Peak (1997). Out west with Liam Neeson in Seraphim Falls (2006)