Pierce Brosnan Bonds With ‘Mister Johnson’

Starring in a very successful television series is a kind of luxurious captivity. Four seasons and nearly 100 episodes of “Remington Steele” made the Irish-born actor Pierce Brosnan an international figure and his private-eye exploits are still being syndicated around the world.

The acclaim and the specific image--devilishly handsome, suave, funny in a debonair way, agile and adventurous--almost made him James Bond in succession to Roger Moore. A poll of fans named him their odds-on favorite choice and, in fact, producer Cubby Broccoli offered him the part.

The offer was contingent on Brosnan getting out of “Remington Steele,” then in its fourth and, as it turned out, final season. But, in a bitter and widely reported story, Brosnan could not get his release. Broccoli, Brosnan says, offered to wait while he shot six more episodes; the producers demanded 22. In the end, only four more were made and the series was not renewed. But by then Broccoli had hired Timothy Dalton, and a stunt double had already been at work on some of the action sequences.

“I bore it philosophically for a while,” Brosnan said not long ago. “Then about six months later it got to me. I was driving down Pacific Coast Highway and I had to pull over to the curb and get out of the car and bellow at the ocean.”

Even now it is not entirely beyond possibility that Brosnan could yet play Bond, but the chances are about on a par with Goldfinger or Blofeld winning. Not all the Bond rights are controlled by Broccoli. Kevin McClory has others and if he should decide to make another (he produced “Thunderball”). . . .

What is uncertain is whether the Bond cycle is played out. Broccoli is having another script written for Dalton, but Broccoli is also in contention with MGM-Pathe, which controls the distribution rights through its ownership of the United Artists film library and has been threatened with involuntary bankruptcy by several of its creditors.

Meantime, Brosnan has taken a dramatic turn of tone (or returned to his acting roots, as he thinks of it) by playing a young British colonial officer in 1923 Nigeria in “Mister Johnson,” Bruce Beresford’s first film since “Driving Miss Daisy” (for which he maddeningly was not honored by the Academy, despite all the Oscars it won).

Brosnan is first-rate as the naive, idealistic, sensitive young man befriending Mister Johnson, the sly, quick black clerk who, educated by the British in a colonial school, reveres all things British and ends up torn between (and torn apart by) the conflicting cultures. (Johnson is played by a wonderful Nigeria-born but London-trained actor named Maynard Eziashi.)

Joyce Cary, from whose 1939 novel the film was scripted by William Boyd, was himself in the Nigerian colonial service before, during and just after World War I and wrote about the clash of cultures with balance and sympathy.

“I lived in a tree house with a galvanized roof the three months of the shooting,” Brosnan says. The location was at a hill station in the remote interior, a six-hour drive from the airport. Cockroaches and corruption were endemic, but the small English crew and large native cast got along well and the aura of a labor of love surrounded the film.

For Brosnan, it was a return to the characterful acting he felt he had been trained to do. Born in County Meath, Ireland, he moved to London with his family at 11 and got interested in theater early. He helped found an experimental theater troupe in the avant-garde tradition of Jerzy Grotowski. It lasted nearly three years and played Paris and Amsterdam.

“ Then ,” Brosnan says, “I decided I’d better go to drama school. I lacked training in the written word. I hadn’t done Ibsen or any of the classics. There was a rawness to my talent.” He went to the Method-oriented Drama Centre in London, got a job as an actor and assistant stage manager in York and, in his big break, was picked by Tennessee Williams to play in the British premiere of “Red Devil Battery Sign.”

He has done both heroes and villains (always useful in the long haul)--an IRA assassin in “The Long Good Friday” with Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine’s KGB nemesis in “The Fourth Protocol.” He will be evil again opposite Judd Nelson in “Entangled,” a thriller Hitchcock once hoped to do. And he’s been asked to play Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in Sir Richard Attenborough’s announced but delayed production of “Chaplin.”

It’s possibly not the same as being the new James Bond; still it’s no bad thing being the newly versatile Pierce Brosnan.