On the last day of March, at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, fans approach actor Pierce Brosnan every few minutes. Some address him as Mr Brosnan, some as Mr Bond, a reference to the four James Bond movies he made in the 1990s and early 2000s. (Brosnan has a face that demands honorifics.)
Dressed in chic monochrome – navy trench, navy pants, a navy ascot at the neck of a navy shirt – he is gracious with them all, if lightly evasive. (And yes, he is the rare man who looks plausible in an ascot.) At 71, he doesn’t often show the whole of himself. People see what they want. Mostly they see Bond.
“They miss a lot,” he says. “But it’s not up to me to show a lot. It’s not up to me to do anything but be pleasant.”
There has always been more to Brosnan than meets the eye, although what meets the eye is obviously very nice. “He is very fortunate in the genes department,” says Tom Hardy, his costar on the new Paramount+ gangster series MobLand. Brosnan refers to it all as “the Celtic alchemy”.
A long-time painter and art enthusiast, Brosnan counts The Thomas Crown Affair, a 1999 art heist caper, as the favourite of his movies, mostly because he got to keep the paintings. So when promotional duties bring him to New York – he splits his time between Malibu and Hawaii – he squeezes in a museum visit.
On arrival, the Guggenheim spiral closed for installation. (“That’s boring,” he says mildly at the ticket counter.) He contents himself with the works on display. “I love colour,” Brosnan says, admiring some canvases by Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes. “Exhilarating. Captivating.” His speech has a casual lyricism – he’ll rarely use a single adjective when two or three will do – but he seems to mean it.
In his acting career, Brosnan’s palette has been fairly particular. “It’s been part of my story as an actor,” he says. “Playing the hero, playing the mysterious man, playing the man that you trust.” But his recent roles (and some that he has taken before: The Matador, The Tailor of Panama) complicate that persona.
Conrad, the criminal boss he plays in MobLand, harbours brutality underneath his gentlemanly wardrobe. Arthur, the British spy chief he animates in Steven Soderbergh’s sleek espionage thriller Black Bag has his complications, too. And yet, Brosnan is still and always Bond.
“You really can’t get away from it,” he says. Which at least partly explains why, half an hour into his visit, Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s chief curator, offers him a tour of the installation in progress. Then she introduces him to the artist behind it, Rashid Johnson.
“I’m a fan of yours,” Johnson says. “You were my Bond.”
They chat about art for a while. In 2023, Brosnan, who worked as a commercial artist in his teens, had his first show, So Many Dreams, at a Los Angeles gallery. He tells Johnson what he likes about painting as opposed to acting: “The innocence of it all and no expectations.” Then he says goodbye. “Be bold,” he urges Johnson.
Walking out, Brosnan admires a Pierre Bonnard, a Paul Cézanne, several Picassos. He clocks a Wassily Kandinsky from all the way across the room. “Just makes you want to paint,” he says. He has fantasies of moving to Paris and apprenticing with some artist in an atelier. But he isn’t ready to give up acting.
“It’s a drug now,” he says. “I need it.” Though Brosnan is often very funny (“He’s got a wicked sense of humour,” Hardy says), it isn’t clear that he is joking.
Certainly he hasn’t quit yet. He shot his role in Black Bag on a quick break from another film, Giant. He began work on MobLand, in which he stars opposite Helen Mirren, just after wrapping the movie The Thursday Murder Club, also opposite Mirren.
Black Bag returns him to the secret service. His character is a spymaster of oblique motivation. The movie pays homage to classic espionage films, which made Brosnan an attractive choice for the role.
“There’s a knowingness that is shared with the audience that’s very pleasurable, a shared secret,” Soderbergh says.
Brosnan knows this, too. “I was trusted to bring them in, to engage with the audience and then to dismantle that persona,” he says. (A further bit of dismantling: He asked Soderbergh for a mild prosthetic for his nose, which sharpens his face.)
He plays a similar game in MobLand, created by Ronan Bennett (the novelist and screenwriter Belfast best known for Top Boy) and directed partly by Guy Ritchie. Brosnan’s Conrad seems the consummate gentleman, but he’s not above kicking a man when he’s down – and wounded and bleeding from the mouth. As his wife, Maeve (Mirren) says, he is, beneath his dapper tweeds and Barbour, “a stone-cold Paddy killer”.
Brosnan’s portrayal makes that brutality engrossing. “He has what they call ‘spell,’” Hardy says. “He casts a spell on the room.”
This is true of Brosnan off-screen as well. His gallantry is profligate, effortless. In our time together, he holds doors; he helps me with my coat; he calls me darling. I know I am being charmed. I am helpless to it. To spend these hours with him is to feel rammed by a tractor-trailer of sheer charisma.
And of course, I love Bond, too. When I wonder aloud why someone like me, who doesn’t typically enjoy gun-forward films, should feel so drawn to the character, Brosnan looks at me wryly. “Sex,” he says. “Sex. Sex. Sex. Love. Lust. Desire. Sex. That’s just it. Own it. Enjoy it. Don’t worry about it.” (Asked about the sale of the Bond franchise to Amazon earlier this year, he is more circumspect: “I wish them well.”)
This version of Brosnan – the curated wardrobe, the way he politely asks to have his lunchtime Chablis cooled (“Give it some good ice, please,” he says) – seems authentic to him. “I love clothes; I love style,” he says. “I love the beauty of life, of men, of women. The art of life, it feeds me.”
But it is also a pose he has perfected over the years, one rooted at least in part in a childhood in Ireland that included abandonment by his father and a long separation from his mother.
“I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter,” he says. “I had no qualifications. I was really behind the eight ball – without a mother, without a father.” But that freedom allowed him to create, he says, “this persona for myself called Pierce” that has become only more refined with wealth, fame and the realisation of his artistic aspirations.
Pierce is arguably his greatest role, and he has little ambivalence toward it or the celebrity it has afforded him.
“I wished it; I wanted it,” he says. “So I get on with it.”
Still, he admits, he is looking forward to the week’s end, when he can be himself, not show himself. But what he shows, in person and on screen, it’s enough. For him, and maybe for the rest of us.
“I’ll keep playing it as long as it goes,” he says. “It got me this far. I’ll keep marching on.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
