It is a weekday morning and I am standing beside Pierce Brosnan on a deserted backstreet, watching a woman in a hairnet and white wellies hosing down the entrance to a fishmarket. The former James Bond is in full flow. “You know the scene in MobLand where I’ve got my foot on that guy’s throat and Tom Hardy is shooting the shit out of everyone?” He is talking in his rich, buttery burr about the recent series in which he and Helen Mirren play the heads of an Irish crime family. “We shot that right here!” He waves at the woman, who silences her hose temporarily. “Hi, hello,” he calls out. “I shot a television show here called MobLand.” She smiles back at him. “Yes,” she replies sweetly, as though indulging a confused uncle. “No idea, has she?” he chuckles. The hose springs back to life with a hiss.
Brosnan, 72, was raised in Navan, County Meath but is now generally to be found at one of his homes in Hawaii or Malibu, and is in London for the release of The Thursday Murder Club, the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime bestseller. Brosnan teams up with Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as retirement-home sleuths whose weekly divertissement solving historical cold cases turns serious when fresh corpses start popping up. Today, he has agreed to a one-off meeting of the Wednesday Nostalgia Club, strolling around the area of north London where he cut his teeth and earned his stripes. “Down the lane of memory,” he says cheerily.
