Pierce Brosnan has what grandmothers might call a “twinkle”. Or at least the kind of face that would make cartoon animals hit themselves with enormous mallets while their eyes bulge out of their heads. And he knows this. Obviously. You don’t play James Bond and get voted the Sexiest Man Alive at the relatively late age of 48 without cottoning on. And you can also tell because when I ask Brosnan about being a famously very good-looking dude, he barely blinks. There’s no faux modesty. No admonishing. Just a sharp nod of recognition. Water is wet. Climate change is real. Pierce Brosnan – then, now, and tomorrow – looks absolutely fantastic.
“I was taught in drama school to transform,” he explains, when I ask whether he’d ever wanted to not be so famously good-looking. “But then I went to America and had too good a time playing myself. Or trying to play myself, which is not an easy thing to do. And I had responsibilities as a man, as a father, and I found employment easily.” Just think of the hits: Remington Steele; Mrs Doubtfire; the second-best volcano disaster movie of 1997, Dante’s Peak. “Sometimes I made choices that I shouldn’t have made. I was dealing with the self, and that image of the self. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s free reign.”
