Alan Cumming recalls hilarious ‘GoldenEye’ reunion with ‘goofball’ Pierce Brosnan

Former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan isn’t actually an international spy (we think), but life apparently imitated art on the set of GoldenEye…at least in a comical way.

While speaking to Entertainment Weekly for our 2024 LGBTQ+ Pride cover story, Brosnan’s GoldenEye costar Alan Cumming recalled a particularly hair-raising element of starring in the 1995 blockbuster.

“There was some sort of hair company sponsoring the film. It often happens, there’s a sponsor for the hair care products,” the Traitors host explains. “So they’d put this stuff in our hair to ‘activate’ it, and then 20 minutes later did something else to it. They’d literally come to your dressing room and say, ‘Alan, could you come have your hair activated, please?'” I just thought, ‘Oh, that must be what they do in these big blockbuster films,’ because it was my first big movie.”

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

A few years later, Cumming — who played Boris Grishenko, a computer programmer affiliated with the crime syndicate Janus, in the film — was visiting Brosnan at his home, “and when I was in his bathroom. I said, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got the activator!’ He had some in his bathroom!” the actor says, letting out a guffaw. “We were laughing about it, about how we would get activated and then we’d sort of be deactivated at the end of the day. And he went and got it and he put it in his hair, and then he put it in his hair on his legs and his chest and he was running around saying, ‘I’m activated! I’m activated!’ It was so hilarious. I suppose that’s what I think about most of that film: what a goofball Pierce is.”

But that’s not what most GoldenEye fans think of when they run into Cumming.

“It was such a long time ago but people still freak out about it. Maybe it has to do with the [GoldenEye] video game, which is iconic,” he muses. “People always ask me to say, ‘I’m invincible’ — still shout at me in the street and everything. It’s sort of grown slowly and now it’s become this sort of catchphrase, I guess. It’s great to have a catchphrase. I love a catchphrase.”