By Jake Coyle
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — A debonair Pierce Brosnan, Bond-like in black jacket and gleaming white shirt, strides into a Manhattan hotel room for an interview.
“I don’t normally dress like this,” he quickly notes.
Glamour has always come easily — almost too easily — for Brosnan, whom his fellow drama school students dubbed “Hollywood” long before the Irish actor became a star. But if Brosnan has occasionally leaned too much on his good looks, he’s recently settled into more of a character actor’s life.
Brosnan has four films out in the coming weeks, a diverse group of movies that speaks to his simple desire for work and his increasing comfort in challenging himself. A few years ago, he may have been in a “post-Bond” phase with such movies as the offbeat comedy “The Matador” and the Western “Seraphim Falls.” But he’s now post-post-Bond, less self-aware of his iconic stature and more a working, maturing actor.
“I have said to my agents, ‘I want to work,’ ” Brosnan says. “I want to play character roles. You can be a leading man for so long and it’s wonderful, but there comes a time where you have to deal with life and move over on the stage.”
The first of Brosnan’s four upcoming films is “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” a mythical fantasy that adapts Rick Riordan’s kids best seller. Sean Bell stars as a demigod, whose self-discovery is guided by Chiron (Brosnan), a centaur. (Yes, that’s half-man, half-horse.)
In Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” Brosnan co-stars as a former British prime minister, a character clearly modeled after Tony Blair. In “The Greatest,” a Sundance entry in 2009, he plays the father of a family (Susan Sarandon, Johnny Simmons) dealing with the grief of their teenage son’s death. And in “Remember Me,” Brosnan — with Brooklyn accent — plays the father of a rebellious New York teenager (Robert Pattinson).