‘One grows into one’s years – and that is a gift in itself’

Pierce Brosnan, who cut a suave figure as the 007 of the new millennium, speaks to Patrick Smith about getting older, the importance of political protest, and his accent in ‘MobLand’

- By Patrick Smith

Thirty years ago, Pierce Brosnan announced himself as 007 with a dizzying jump from a vast, vertiginous concrete dam in one of the best openings to one of the best Bonds, GoldenEye.

The 72-year-old makes a slightly more relaxed entrance today, but he’s every bit as unruffled as the suave super spy. A sharply cut navy blue suit. A lustrous, swooping grey mane. He strolls into the room with the stillness of someone who knows exactly how to occupy a space without crowding it.

Back in 1995, he was joining a franchise born of the international success of a famous series of novels. So too now, as he arrives on our screens in The Thursday Murder Club, adapted from the first of Richard Osman’s bestselling blue-rinse detective stories. They’re a crime-fiction phenomenon: four OAP sleuths, astronomical sales and, inevitably, grumblings about their cosy, middle-class view of Britain. Too sanitised by half, some have said. That, Brosnan responds, “is a lot of hogwash”.

The first novel, published in 2020, is set in an upmarket retirement village in the fictional Kentish town of Fairhaven. Four of its residents have formed a “murder club” that meets once a week to delve into unsolved cases from the past. Then someone is killed on their doorstep, and they turn their attention to solving the clues right under their noses.