Thirty years ago, Pierce Brosnan<\/a> 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<\/a>. The 72-year-old makes a slightly more relaxed entrance today, but he\u2019s 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 composure of a man who knows exactly how to occupy a space without crowding it. <\/p>\n 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<\/a>, adapted from the first of Richard Osman<\/a>\u2019s bestselling blue-rinse detective stories. They\u2019re a crime-fiction phenomenon: four OAP sleuths, astronomical sales and, inevitably, grumblings about their cosy, middle-class view<\/a> of Britain. Too sanitised by half, some have said. That, Brosnan responds, \u201cis a lot of hogwash\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmurder club\u201d 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. <\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s the whiff of well-heeled privilege that gets some people\u2019s goat. \u201cI think that\u2019s a little ill directed,\u201d Brosnan sighs, in his elegant Irish burr. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s entertainment, and you want to be dazzled. You want to transport people, and you want them to come away with a wonderful sense of \u2018I want to be there when I\u2019m old. I want to grow old like this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Osman based it on the retirement village where his mother Brenda lives, observing on visits that \u201cas an Agatha Christie fan, this would be an amazing place for a murder\u201d. 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\u2019s retirement village, Coopers Chase. <\/p>\n The star power on screen, too, shows just how certain the producers are that audiences will want to see Osman\u2019s 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). <\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s Last Tango in Halifax to the 2011 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Brosnan is very comfortable with his own advancing age. \u201cI have become [an OAP],\u201d he says. \u201cOne grows into one\u2019s years, and that is a gift in itself. It\u2019s wonderful at the age of 72 to have had a career and to still find employment.\u201d He had a \u201cglorious summer\u201d making the movie, he tells me.<\/p>\n He also got a huge kick out of playing \u201cRed Ron\u201d (although he\u2019s shaved off the beard that he grew for the part). \u201cRon and I are joined at the hip in some respects,\u201d he argues. \u201cHe has gone out into the trenches fighting for the cause. As an actor, I\u2019ve gone out and done the same in the world of environmental activism. I know what it\u2019s like to go up against \u2018the man\u2019, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s backed up by every news report of eightysomethings being arrested in Gaza demonstrations. <\/p>\n \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan in \u2018The Thursday Murder Club\u2019 (Netflix)<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Life in Navan was \u201cfairly solitary\u201d, he later recalled, but his roots remain important to him; his experience of London was of being bullied at school and learning to hold his own, yet there was a price to pay. \u201cI left school at 15 feeling fairly useless and not really up to scratch in my education,\u201d he told The Independent in 2006.<\/p>\n He thought of becoming a commercial artist (\u201cI love art; I\u2019m a painter,\u201d he tells me), but acting offered another way forward. And his resilience served him well as he struggled through the ranks in regional theatre, then film and TV bit parts: \u201cLast Victim\u201d in Hammer House of Horror, for instance, and \u201cFirst Irishman\u201d in The Long Good Friday, where he memorably cruises one of Bob Hoskins\u2019s underlings at a swimming pool before stabbing him in the ribs. Electing to try his hand in the USA, he used his dreamboat looks and debonair manner to win the title role (well, sort of, it\u2019s complicated) in 94 episodes of the high-concept detective series Remington Steele between 1982 and 1987. <\/p>\n The show put him in the running to play Bond, but he couldn\u2019t escape his contract in order to take over from Roger Moore in 1986. That time, Timothy Dalton stepped in, but when the franchise rebooted in 1995 after a tedious six-year legal dispute, its producers took advantage of Dalton\u2019s contract having lapsed to install the younger man. It paid off. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Brosnan as the titular character in detective drama \u2018Remington Steele\u2019 (NBC)<\/p>\n Since they\u2019d run out of Ian Fleming books to adapt, the Bond films had been slowly dying on the vine. Brosnan and GoldenEye breathed vivid new life into the franchise \u2013 much in the way that Casino Royale did with Daniel Craig \u2013 and the same will be needed again in the death-of-Bond era. Ricky Gervais joked in a tweet about taking on the role himself \u2013 a notion Brosnan toys with as worth exploring, especially since \u201cyou have to be tough as old boots to play the role, because not everyone is going to be happy with you\u201d. <\/p>\n\n
![\"Celia](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Film_Review_-_The_Thursday_Murder_Club_42462.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Brosnan](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-29-at-14-31-31.png\")
<\/p>\n
![\"Brosnan](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1756553236_381_newFile-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Brosnan](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-29-at-14-39-54.png\")
<\/p>\n