By 
Pierce Brosnan is perhaps the most contented man in the known universe. He’s got his Hawaiian dream house. He’s got his lovely wife. He’s got his extremely long sons.
When Esquire invited him to do a mid-lockdown watchalong of GoldenEye, he ended an anecdote about losing a one-of-a-kind Aston Martin in a house fire with a breezy: “Ha! Life." Only the license plates and eight screws were left Pierce! Remember?!
But there was a moment during Brosnan’s promo rounds for Black Adam when something else came out. “I did get a platinum album for my singing, you know,” he told the NME, reflecting on his frog-throated parping on the Mamma Mia! soundtrack. “So fuck the begrudgers.”
Given how few begrudgers there have been, it says something that any should float through the perfect seascape of his life. He’s just appeared, remember, in Black Adam as Dr Fate: a piece of absolutely pitch-perfect casting which leverages all of Brosnan’s easy charm and crumpled charisma. He sounds, for the first time in a while, like he has something to prove. It felt like the Brosnaissance might at last be upon us.
Slightly disappointingly though – and beware spoilers – Brosnan’s time as Dr Fate looks like it might already have ended. That feels like a shame, because for years now I’ve been waiting for the onset of the Brosnaissance.
There have been a few false dawns of the Brosnaissance. (And I should know, I’ve watched enough of them.) The post-Bond lull in proceedings, as he worked out exactly what kind of an ex-Bond he wanted to be, took him in a few directions.
Post-Bond acting careers come in a few flavours. Sean Connery tried middlebrow respectability with a couple of Sidney Lumet films before Diamonds Are Forever tempted him back for a last, doomed rodeo. From there, his course was muddled before, starting with Time Bandits, he eased into twinkly old man roles with an undercurrent of violence.
George Lazenby grew a big beard and dreamed of becoming Dennis Hopper. Timothy Dalton went back to the stage. You suspect Daniel Craig will do alright for himself.
His closest Bond antecedent is probably Roger Moore, who graciously accepted his status as a pop cultural ornament and spent about as much time acting as he did emailing jokes back and forth with Lazenby. Bur Brosnan’s always been a better actor than dear old Rog, whose greatest post-Bond achievement was his contested claim to have invented the Magnum choc ice.
Brosnan’s immediate post-Bond years saw attempts to get in on the neo-Western goldrush (Seraphim Falls) and a gangster comedy thriller (The Matador) among too many forgettable dramas and – dear lord – so very many romcoms. Mamma Mia! was the one absolutely copper-bottomed hit, and I will celebrate both it and Brosnan’s Sam Carmichael to my dying breath.
Then, little of note. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief – in which he had a tilt at doing the Michael Caine role in a Christopher Nolan film – didn’t quite flash, and as brilliant as his turn in Edgar Wright’s The World’s End was, it was all too brief. There were a lot of not-Bond Bond films, including a football-based thriller in which he tries to blow up Upton Park.
So what does Brosnan do? There are few actors cinemagoers would be more ready to see have a late period flowering than him, but he’s not an Albert Finney type, canny and weatherbeaten enough to become an extremely high grade character actor. Whenever he’s done character parts in the past it’s been immediately obvious that he’s simply been Pierce Brosnan wearing a different hat.
But as his Dr Fate shows, his charm and swagger levels are still something faintly supernatural. A late period spent popping up to sprinkle his arch vibes all over minor roles as in Will Ferrell’s Eurovision spoof The Story of Fire Saga, plus exactly the kind of Dr Fate role he’s just had – a sturdy cornerstone of a massive franchise – feels just right.
His time as Dr Fate may not be over yet, anyway. “I think the door is open,” Brosnan said recently. “I honestly have no idea where this will go.”
Either way, it’d be a shame to see his latest chance to carve out an autumnal niche drift away. As a wise man once said: fuck the begrudgers.
