‘A seventy something Bond? They know where to find me’

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. Of course, it’s the whiff of well-heeled privilege that gets some people’s goat. “I think that’s a little ill directed,” Brosnan sighs, in his elegant Irish burr. “I mean, it’s entertainment, and you want to be dazzled. You want to transport people, and you want them to come away with a wonderful sense of ‘I want to be there when I’m old. I want to grow old like this.’”

Osman based it on the retirement village where his mother Brenda lives, observing on visits that “as an Agatha Christie fan, this would be an amazing place for a murder”. The film doubles down and makes it even more upscale, with pretty Aldbury in Hertfordshire standing in for Fairhaven, and the stately Elizabethan manor of Englefield House in Berkshire doubling as Osman’s retirement village, Coopers Chase. The star power on screen, too, shows just how certain the producers are that audiences will want to see Osman’s story brought to life. The murder club members are played by Helen Mirren (as former spy Elizabeth Best); Ben Kingsley (as retired psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif); Celia Imrie (as ex-nurse Joyce Meadowcroft); and Brosnan (as former union leader Ron Ritchie, a West Ham fanatic).

The film also locks on to a trend for golden oldie drama that has produced some big hits over the past decade and a half, from TV’s Last Tango in Halifax to the 2011 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Brosnan is very comfortable with his own advancing age. “I have become (an OAP),” he says. “One grows into one’s years, and that is a gift in itself. It’s wonderful at the age of 72 to have had a career and to still find employment.” He had a “glorious summer” making the movie, he tells me.

He also got a huge kick out of playing “Red Ron” (although he’s shaved off the beard that he grew for the part). “Ron and I are joined at the hip in some respects,” he argues. “He has gone out into the trenches fighting for the cause. As an actor, I’ve gone out and done the same in the world of environmental activism. I know what it’s like to go up against ‘the man’, to protest, to be part of the endeavour to do well by your fellow man, your environment, whether it be oceans or old-growth trees.” When I press for more on this, Brosnan tells me to google him, and calls out millennials like me and the Gen Z cohort that has followed. He’s backed up by every news report of eightysomethings being arrested in Gaza demonstrations.

“This generation is not protesting enough. It seems to have kind of lost a voice for speaking out against what is happening, whether it be in politics or the environment, or life. But the restrictions now are quite severe. You can feel the manacle of power. But nevertheless, I think, if one keeps hope and faith alive, that the pendulum will swing back to an equilibrium of dignity and compassion for each other.” Underpinning this belief in fighting for a better world is a steely core. Brosnan made it without privilege smoothing a path for him. Acting liberated him from a childhood filled with adversity. Born in Drogheda on the east coast of Ireland, 30 miles up from Dublin, he spent the majority of his early years with his grandparents in nearby Navan, after his father abandoned the family when he was still an infant. His mother left for England as an economic migrant to build a new life as a nurse, then remarried and brought her son to join her just before his teenage years.