Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brosnan is an actor, born 1953.
Pierce Brosnan left school at sixteen, trained in commercial illustration, and only then spent three years at the Drama Centre in London. He worked on stage, took a bit part as an Irish gunman in The Long Good Friday in 1980, earned a Golden Globe nomination for the television serial Nancy Astor in 1982, and became a household name the same year with Remington Steele, a detective series that ran to 1987 and typecast him as the charming rogue for a decade.
In 1995 he became the fifth actor to play James Bond, across GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day. He is the Bond who best understood the joke: impeccable, faintly amused by his own glamour, and always half a beat away from letting the audience see the vanity underneath. That self-awareness is his most useful asset, and the films that exploit it are far better than the ones that just photograph him. He founded the production company Irish DreamTime with Beau St. Clair in 1996, and picked up a Saturn Award for Best Actor along the way.
After Bond he did the smartest possible thing and started playing men who are ridiculous. The Matador, a sweaty, unravelling hitman, brought a second Golden Globe nomination in 2005. The Ghost Writer gave him a slippery former prime minister. Mamma Mia! asked him to sing, which he cannot really do, and the sincerity of the attempt is most of why it is loved. Recent years have brought Dr. Fate, MobLand and The Thursday Murder Club.
Movies (80)
- Black Adam (2022)
- Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
- Mamma Mia! (2008)
- GoldenEye (1995)
- Fast Charlie (2023)
- Die Another Day (2002)
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)
- Dante's Peak (1997)
- Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
- The World Is Not Enough (1999)
- Mars Attacks! (1996)
- The Foreigner (2017)
- Black Bag (2025)
- Cinderella (2021)
- The Tailor of Panama (2001)
- The Misfits (2021)
- No Escape (2015)
- Survivor (2015)
- Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)
- The Thursday Murder Club (2025)
- Remember Me (2010)
- The World's End (2013)
- The King of Kings (2025)
- The November Man (2014)
- The Long Good Friday (1980)
- The Unholy Trinity (2025)
- The King's Daughter (2022)
- The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
- After the Sunset (2004)
- The Out-Laws (2023)
TV (10)
Where to start with Pierce Brosnan
Begin at the obvious place, GoldenEye. It is the best of his four Bond films and the one where the persona and the part fit exactly, before the series drifted into invisible cars.
The essential follow-up is The Matador, where he plays a hitman falling apart in a Mexico City hotel and dismantles his own suavity for laughs. The Tailor of Panama does something similar with a genuinely repellent spy, and The Ghost Writer is the best straight dramatic work he has done.
For the crowd-pleasers, The Thomas Crown Affair is the peak of him as an elegant thief and Mamma Mia! is the one your family will actually want to put on. Completists should look up The Long Good Friday for the fifteen seconds of a young Brosnan that started everything, and The Foreigner for a late, hard-edged turn as an Irish politician with a past.
The Bond films
Four films across seven years, and the interesting thing is how visibly the tone drifts from GoldenEye to Die Another Day. Remington Steele is the television series that cost him the job the first time it was offered.
The escape routes
The films where he plays men who are compromised, frightened or plainly bad, most of them made deliberately after the Bond years. The Matador is the one to start with, and The Tailor of Panama does the same trick with more acid.
The crowd-pleasers
He is very relaxed about being in a broad comedy, and the audience is generally happy to have him there. Mamma Mia is the one people quote at him, and The Thomas Crown Affair is the last time the charm carried a film alone.