Pierce Brosnan Talks Ireland, ‘MobLand’, & Working With Guy Ritchie

Pierce Brosnan is no stranger to a signature sidearm. For years, the actor embodied one of the world’s most iconic action characters: Walther PPK-toting superspy, James Bond. In that role, he — like his gun — was suave and subtle, often silenced but never shaken (nor stirred, for that matter). Brosnan’s latest project, however, finds him on the other side of the law, and wielding a much bigger, much badder pistol — a king-sized Desert Eagle.

His performance, too, is of a different calibre. As Conrad Harrigan, the gangland patriarch of 10-part Paramount+ drama MobLand, Brosnan plays in the grey; a morally malignant turn alongside co-stars Tom Hardy and Dame Helen Mirren. The scripts first crossed Brosnan’s desk last summer, by British playwright Jez Butterworth (who, coincidentally, co-wrote Daniel Craig’s penultimate Bond film, Spectre). Guy Ritchie was already attached to direct.

“And Guy,” says Brosnan, speaking to SHARP ahead of MobLand’s London premiere, “he set me free in many respects. He allowed me to go anywhere I wanted on the stage, and to play the great emotions Conrad has.”

Brosnan started out as a stage actor. Several years after leaving his native Ireland at 11, he enrolled at Drama Centre London. Before turning 25, Tennessee Williams has already hand-selected Brosnan to play the protagonist of The Red Devil Battery Sign at Camden Town’s Roundhouse Theatre. Mirren, with whom Brosnan first appeared alongside in 1980 thriller The Long Good Friday, is also a classically trained performer and the pair quickly identified a Shakespearean feel to MobLand’s thorny dynastic dynamics.

“I think that’s one of the threads and themes of Guy’s work,” nods Brosnan, now 71. “He takes from the greats. He takes the storylines, the themes of Shakespearean dramas or Jacobean tragedies. So Helen and I talked about Macbeth, about King Lear. You can have that as a grand notion in your head, and it sticks. It seeps into your body language and the playing of it can be, from my perspective, quite theatrical. He’s a big character, is Conrad.”

MobLand follows Hardy’s fixer, Harry Da Souza, as he does the bidding of Brosnan’s big boss. Together, they contend with battle lines, drug deals and rival gangs — not to mention dissent within their own ranks. And, although Brosnan’s Harrigan is also an Irishman, the actor reveals this decision was made only 15 minutes before the cameras began to roll.

“Really! Because I’d been thinking North or South London, those accents. Then, on the day, Guy just said: ‘Go more Irish’. And I thought, bloody hell. More Irish? What even is my Irish accent? I’ve forgotten what my Irish accent sounds like. It’s buried in time.”

But Brosnan called up friend and dialect coach, Brendan Gunn, who suggested he borrow the tone and timbre of a certain Irish politician. Seasoned, professional, and with “high adrenaline, because it’s the first day of shooting,” Brosnan ran with the impromptu idea — and stuck the accent. But the actor says he occasionally breaks out an Irish twang at home, assuming a tongue-in-cheek character to amuse his family.

“I’m always play-acting this Irish character at home,” he laughs. “It’s usually me being a bull in a china shop: impatient, daft, bloody stupid. And Conrad is something of that as well.”

Since last summer, the whole series has been filmed, edited and readied for release. It’s a breakneck turnaround, and one that has kept Brosnan from his family home for some time. “It’s been a long five months,” he says. “And I haven’t seen my wife since Christmas. But I’ll see her this weekend, in New York.”

Brosnan defines family as “life, love, creation, and hard work”. “I’ve been blessed with good work,” he adds, “so I’ve always managed to take care of a family.” This outlook is one of the very few things the actor shares with Harrigan. The mob boss’s world turns around his scheming brood, particularly Mirren’s wily wife, Maeve. “They’re joined at the hip,” says Brosnan. “There’s a madness to them both, but also comedy. So it’s quite funny, even when they’re killing people! It’s delightfully, sadistically satirical. It’s not real — it’s play.”

This might be the Guy Ritchie influence. There’s a snappy, Scorsesean touch to proceedings from the off, and it’s perhaps the lairiest and sweariest we’ve ever seen Brosnan. His poison-tongued tête-à-têtes with Geoff Bell, who plays a rival boss, are particularly zesty. Brosnan first met Bell, he says, filming The Thursday Murder Club, a Spielberg-produced film adaptation dropping on Netflix later this year. Brosnan plays a former union activist; Mirren, once again, stars alongside him.

So — secret agents, crime lords, amateur sleuths — Brosnan’s roles run the gamut. He’s belted out Scandi-pop standards in two Mamma Mia! movies, been administered the Heimlich by Mrs. Doubtfire, and even slipped into Steve McQueen’s blue canvas kicks for a 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Also a keen painter, Brosnan daubs each of his scripts with the colours of his characters. Harrigan, he reveals, was conjured from brushstrokes of green, purple, and yellow.

“I usually do self-portraits,” says Brosnan of his paintings. “So they end up being pretty mental. They’re brutal, angry, severe. But rather beautiful. I’ve set sail out there, into that world of artistic intention where you need courage to show the work, the drawings, the paintings. It’s therapeutic for me, as an actor, working on a script.”

With 10 episodes of MobLand, that’s plenty of potential canvas. “And it moved fast,” Brosnan says of the show’s brisk production pace. “It can feel like you’re trying to catch up the whole time. As we got further down — episode seven, eight, nine — you might find that you’ve learned the script one way, then you’re going another way with it. It can get prickly.”

Thankfully, while stage work was Brosnan’s first love, his first big break came on television — with five seasons of NBC detective drama, Remington Steele. This not only endeared the actor to long-form, episodic storytelling, but also taught him how to learn line upon line, in script after script.

“Remington was a baptism by fire!” he laughs. “It was like weekly rep [a style of theatre where companies stage a new play every seven days]. 22 episodes, seven days to shoot an episode. Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Every day. So yes, that’s a training, and you get conditioned. But I love the world of TV. I grew up on TV, loads of shows — American, mostly. But British comedies. Monty Python, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, The Two Ronnies, Porridge. Wonderful comedies with great writers. They’re all part of my DNA as an actor, and I ate them all up.

“But yes, the brain is a bit slower now, at this age,” says Brosnan of his current creative process, “so you do have to work really hard. And even harder as shows go on.”

And yet, with a Steven Soderbergh film (Black Bag) currently in cinemas, and five additional projects also in production — including a boxing biopic and mountaineering thriller with Lily James — Brosnan’s show goes on handsomely, with no ending in sight for lines to be learned, characters to be coloured, and (whether Walther or Desert Eagle) triggers to be pulled.

Feature image supplied by Paramount+, additional imagery from past Book For Men shoot.

Photography: Leigh Keily

Styling: Wendi & Nicole

Grooming: David Cox

The post Pierce Brosnan Talks Ireland, ‘MobLand’, & Working With Guy Ritchie appeared first on Sharp Magazine.