Retire? Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley aren’t ready for the old folks home yet

Two questions into our discussion of The Thursday Murder Club, Sir Ben Kingsley is already quoting Shakespeare. “The Fool says to King Lear: ‘Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,’ he says in that familiar, melodious voice. “I feel something – I think I’m talking about both my character and myself – gently tapping on the door, waiting to come in, which is wisdom,” he continues. “And that surprises me because I never thought I’d ever get wise.”

The Thursday Murder Club is a gilt-edged adaptation of Richard Osman’s hit novel. It centres on a quartet of residents in a retirement home who meet to discuss unsolved murders and see if they can unravel them. Kingsley plays Ibrahim, a reticent former psychiatrist; the other members are Helen Mirren’s forthright Elizabeth – a former spy with MI6 – Celia Imrie’s eager retired nurse Joyce and Pierce Brosnan’s Ron, a salt-of-the-earth former union leader. Ibrahim’s nervous reserve is whittled away by his friendship with the Murder Clubbers; he is revealed to be a lover of finer things, with an apartment within Cooper Chase’s residential home that is an Aladdin’s Cave of objets d’art and promising decanters.

It’s all very much at the sunny, funny end of the detective genre, directed by family comedy veteran Chris Columbus, so any Shakespearean comparison comes as something of a surprise. “I do measure everything by the Bard,” Kingsley says. “And I would definitely say that this would fall into my Lear category. I can’t explain that, it’s just something I have as a measure. Some roles fall into my Hamlet category, some into my Iago category and this one is in my Lear category.” In private, he has given Ibrahim a vivid life story. “Probably only the tip of the iceberg is visible, but I needed a backstory to explain the wonderful apartment he had and his curiosity as a healer.”

Pierce Brosnan approached his character Ron with less certainty – but then, as he says, that’s always his way. “I read the books – I’d never read the books – and I was captivated by the writing and the character,” he says. Even so, he couldn’t understand why Columbus, with whom he had last worked on Mrs Doubtfire in 1993, had chosen him to play working-class hero Ron. “I was reading it thinking, ‘Hmm?’ and for some reason I thought of Ray Winstone, so I started listening to Ray Winstone.”

He knew Osman had approved him, so took some comfort from that. “But I have this with everything I do, to be honest. I go backwards, forwards and sideways on things, questioning and questioning. It makes me feel better that way. It keeps me alive!”

Drawing room murder mysteries – the so-called “cosy crime” stories where the sleuth is a lady in a cardigan or a moonlighting vicar, and violent death, while freakishly frequent, never upsets anyone unduly – were popular even before “a Christie for Christmas” became the booksellers’ delight. However, it was the publication of Agatha Christie’s first novel in 1920 that marked the beginning of the so-called golden age of the genre, which was dominated by women and ruled by her. The Queen of Crime is constantly present, like a portrait over the mantelpiece, in Osman’s four Thursday Murder Club novels.

Their success has been phenomenal. Arguably, Osman had a head start in the British market as a popular television game-show host, but this does not account for his sales of about 10 million around the world. Last year, he launched the first book in a new series, We Solve Murders, set of course in a bucolic English village, centred on a former policeman and his bodyguard daughter-in-law chasing killers around the globe. It immediately topped the bestseller list in the UK and Australia, where it became the sixth-biggest book of 2024.

Not that he is the only storyteller mining that fictional seam. In cinema, the American indie writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 film Knives Out – a country house murder mystery with Daniel Craig playing an eccentric New Orleans detective – was a surprise success, quickly followed by two sequels. There is no question these kinds of stories are having a moment in troubled times, but what’s their secret sauce?

“Audience participation,” says Kingsley. “You have to engage. Because you want to be ahead of the sleuths. You can’t watch passively. You have to participate and audiences love that.”

Brosnan chips in. “They do,” he agrees. “But in this story you have an ensemble of characters. You have the quartet of detectives but like an Agatha Christie, these other wonderful characters weave their way through the story. That allows for great performances. Anyone can steal the scene, so it’s fun. It’s play.”

It wouldn’t feel like play in real life if, as in The Thursday Murder Club, one of the owners of your old folk’s home was bludgeoned to death in his kitchen, still less if his co-owner was then killed during a jostling protest by someone with a hypodermic full of poison. There is a frisson of cognitive dissonance, surely, in the way the fact of death is so diminished.

For the actors, says Kingsley, that doesn’t matter; they are playing the moment as it unfolds. “But I do think that paradox is in the audience – and that it’s also that stretch that intrigues them. You know: why am I feeling several things at once? But that’s what you pay for! To be stimulated and entertained!”

Hovering just out of view, of course, is an acknowledgement in the Murder Club stories that life is fleeting; these amateur detectives are not so far from death themselves, albeit the kind that comes naturally. Osman never shies away from acknowledging that reality, at least. At the point where the story begins, one former member of the club is in a coma; the members come back from their investigations and tell her what they have discovered, resisting the knowledge she is already gone from them forever.

In real life, Kingsley is 81; Pierce Brosnan is 72. Apart from Kingsley’s aforementioned getting of wisdom, neither of them is showing any signs of ageing. The two men didn’t know each other before making this film. Many of their on-set conversations, they agree, focused on gratitude. They have been able to earn a living doing the thing they loved, which is a rare gift. What’s more, they’re still doing it.

“It’s such a capricious game,” says Brosnan. “To be at the table for this length of time, to be still enthusiastic for it and passionate for it and wanting to get better…”

Kingsley interrupts: “And scared. And nervous. All of the above!” They laugh. To be frightened, says Kingsley, is essential.

Mention retirement and they both look suddenly vague, as if they’re not sure what the word means. “No, no,” says Brosnan eventually. “I don’t wish it. I don’t want it.”

Not that it’s a bad thing. “It’s utterly appropriate for some people,” says Kingsley. “It’s just that on my trajectory, I can’t see it. I’d love to live a creative life until I stop breathing.”

Brosnan agrees. How lucky he was, he reflects, to have played James Bond all those years ago. “A great character, who has given me such life. The gift that keeps giving,” he says. “It’s all about the doing of life. Making a creative life, entertaining people, making people happy. It’s a gift. It’s a joy.”

The Thursday Murder Club streams on Netflix from August 28.

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