(Credits: LBJ Library)
Sat 8 November 2025 11:00, UK
It would be churlish not to admit we all get embarrassed from time to time, sometimes walking out of a pub toilet with loo paper on our shoes or our flies undone. But one good way to counteract the fact is simply to be a ridiculously handsome A-list movie star like Pierce Brosnan, so such upsetting occurrences don’t feel so bad.
Not that you can imagine Brosnan suffering these kinds of events, because he’s far too good-looking and way too cool. You can’t even really imagine him doing day-to-day stuff like having a chippy dinner, because it’s Pierce Brosnan. When he played James Bond, he was the absolute epitome of what your brain tells you Bond should be like, and James Bond doesn’t accidentally wave at people.
Now, the exception to all this, when you’re Pierce Brosnan, is not the embarrassment that comes from the pocket of your dressing gown getting stuck on a door handle, but instead agreeing to appear in monumentally bad films like, let’s say, 2022’s Black Adam starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
Because, sadly for the veteran, its a movie that not many people went to watch and even fewer cared about; even the starting point ‘let’s do a spin-off of Shazam‘ should have been enough for someone to pipe up with some semblance of caution, but it wasn’t, and so The Rock was signed up and someone signed off on a budget of more than $250million.
Based on a DC Comics character, the film is about an ancient superhero who is unleashed from magic imprisonment by some archaeologists, which sounds a bit like Aladdin, and a lot like The Mummy, which The Rock was also in. It went through too many rewrites and got delayed by Covid-19, and didn’t break even at the box office, which isn’t really a surprise to anyone.
Pierce seemed to love being in it, however, and at the time he told the Daily Express, “I’ve always loved the comic book genre and I love these movies. They’re spectacular, so to be part of Black Adam is just monumental. When I was offered this role. I was so overjoyed, so overwhelmed, really.”
He sounds like he’s being serious, so presumably he either hadn’t seen it at that point or didn’t intend to, and the embarrassment came not from being in the movie itself, but from having to be strapped into the pretty unforgiving outfits that are required to perform all the digital trickery involved in CGI-heavy big-budget flicks these days.
He added, “When you have the mocap [motion capture] suit, that’s a story all unto itself. It can be highly embarrassing. But thankfully, I worked in the theatre, did pantomime, street theatre and circus work, so I can step out there and hold my head high.”
Fair play, Pierce; perhaps he banked a decent cheque and got on with making much more interesting films like 2024’s superbly slick thriller Black Bag and now Giant, the boxing biopic about Sheffield’s Prince Naseem Hamed, which features Brosnan as the fighter’s trainer, Brendan Ingle, and hits cinemas in January.
He’s also going to be seen with Lily James in a film called Cliffhanger (a reboot of the Sly Stallone one) and no doubt another Thursday Murder Club film on Netflix, the whodunnit franchise made specifically for the kind of people who like A Question of Sport and Charlie Bigham ready meals.
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