Interview | Pierce Brosnan And Ben Kingsley On Comedy, Legacy And The Unruly Pleasures Of 'The Thursday Murder Club'

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman’s beloved tale of septuagenarian sleuths in a pastoral retirement home, has been ushered into a new life by Netflix and director Chris Columbus, who has filled the frame with actors of serious pedigree — Pierce Brosnan, Sir Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren, all of them perfectly willing to play oldies poking around unsolved crimes. Before you imagine this as a British cousin to Only Murders in the Building, it is worth remembering that Osman’s first book appeared in 2020, a full year before OMITB debuted. Not that such genealogies matter much in the end because what distinguishes this film is less the premise than the tone, its mischievous British humour and its slower, slyer rhythms, which approach absurdity and heartbreak less through a barrage of gags than through the recognition of life’s last chapters, and when The Hollywood Reporter India speaks to Brosnan and Kingsley over Zoom, the two men seem intent on emphasising not the laughs but the listening.

“We did not, I promise you, approach this as a comedy,” Kingsley says with characteristic clarity, his voice moving between amused patience and a kind of priestly seriousness. “We approached this as four people enjoying life, enjoying each other's company, and enjoying a very demanding, very challenging hobby. Comedy, if it arises, arises from the truth of the moment.” He speaks of rhythm like a tennis rally, impossible without the other player’s return; he says that attentiveness is the real engine of comic timing.

Brosnan, more languid, more Irish in his cadences, picks up the rally: “Yes, I think so. There’s an inner joy you have to have, you have to play it with a wiggle, as somebody once told me, and it’s about listening, keeping up as the actor with the listening, not lunging for the gag but allowing it to land in silence, in the reaction shot.” They give credit to Columbus’s instinct for the unsaid, the way a camera can linger on what is not spoken, and one can sense that both men took comfort in treating comedy less as punchline and more as choreography.

A still from 'The Thursday Murder Club' on Netflix

On adaptation, they were united in their deference to the novelist’s generosity: Osman had conceded that a literal film of his book would run eight hours, and so he handed it over; Kingsley admits he did not steep himself in the original work, preferring the distilled version that landed on his desk as a script already full of decisions. Brosnan agrees, saying, “You keep it simple, you study, you study, you study, and then something new happens because of your fellow actor or the environment you’re in and it stirs your imagination.” And here Kingsley breaks in with a golfer’s aphorism — practice, practice and practice and hope to get lucky — which he and Brosnan batted back and forth with the ease of two men long accustomed to trading gravitas for charm.

When pressed on the question of legacy, whether such towering filmographies become a burden or a liberation, Kingsley is quick to wave away the weight of history. “I feel that every experience I’ve had is not a memory or a recollection. It’s laminated into my body. It’s stuck to my DNA. I can experience in my body events that happened to me forty, fifty years ago because they’re still alive.” Legacy, in other words, was less a monument than a bloodstream, less a marble pedestal than a set of living muscles.

Between them, the conversation keeps circling back to a kind of philosophy of acting in late life, where comedy comes by not reaching for it, where the so-called weight of legacy dissolves into the daily act of listening — and perhaps that is the most telling note of all, that a film about old age and unsolved mysteries has found its truest expression not in being “about” comedy but in being about the rhythm of presence, the joy of the rally, the tennis ball hit back across the net one more time.