Brosnan back on big screen as boxing coach Ingle

Navan movie star is making film on his own life

Pierce Brosnan is starting to make a film about his own life, the movie star has revealed. In an interview with GQ magazine to celebrate his Man of the Year honour from the men's lifestyle and fashion publication, he said that at first, he'd planned to write a memoir.

“But I find it heavy going and it really doesn't move me.”

So instead, he's been shooting a documentary, for which his team was filming scenes of his paintings when Cam Wolf to arrived to interview him. The Navan native actor is an avid abstract painter.

“For decades. He's been Hollywood's purest personification of charm: Remington Steele, Thomas Crowne, James Bond!” reads the interview intro.

“Now, at 72, the Irishman is enjoying an overdue renaissance by playing with his own (still handsome) image.”

Brosnan reveals he had been asked to meet the legendary director John Huston when he was casting for James Joyce's short story, 'The Dead' in the late 1980s (presumably for the Gabriel Conroy part played by the late Donal McCann). Huston took one look at him and said : “Too handsome.”

He is back on the big screen playing Brendan Ingle in 'Giant', a film looking at the rag to riches story of UK boxer 'Prince' Naseem Hamed, and the role played in his rise by Sheffield-based, Dublin-born Ingle, with whom he later fell out.

Amir El-Masry ('A Haunting in Venice', 'SAS: Rogue Heroes', 'Industry') stars as Naseem 'Naz' Hamed opposite Brosnan in the film, which is written and directed by Rowan Athale ('The Rise', 'Gangs of London', 'Strange But True'). Giant is executive produced by 'Rocky' star Sylvester Stallone.

“He was a showman,” Brosnan says of Ingle. “He had style, he knew how to charm people.”

He sat in a make-up chair for over an hour to become Ingle, his silvered mane replaced with the last remnants of white hair, and the suits by schlubby tracksuit and zip-up jackets.

Brosnan also hopes to do a sequel to murder mystery movie, 'The Thursday Murder Club', and started filming the second season of 'Mobland', the British crime-family drama, in November. (His Irish accent in both Mobland and Giant would raise Roger Moore's eyebrow!)

And with the Broccoli family handing over control of the James Bond franchise to Amazon, he hasn't said no to the idea of working within that film ... the possibilites are “entertaining”, he tells GQ.

Wolf interviewed him at his Malibu beach home, which he and the family are considering selling ever since the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January of this year. Brosnan was shooting Mobland in the UK at the time of the blaze, and remembers tracking the encroachment on his phone and imploring his famly to evacuate.

“The house has lived through too many fires,” he says. “There comes a time to say, 'Enough.'”