Pierce Brosnan taped his finger to gun while filming James Bond scene

Pierce Brosnan’s very first day playing James Bond on the set of GoldenEye was nearly thwarted by an unexpected villain: his pinky finger. 

The actor recently revealed that his very first scene as the legendary Agent 007 was almost ruined by the overeager appendage because it kept springing up out of place while he was trying to hold his gun. 

“The first day for me was Robbie Coltrane — he was the bad guy — [and] Minnie Driver was singing ‘Stand by Your Man’ with a Russian accent,” Brosnan recalled on Wednesday’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “I had actually just had hand surgery, to tell you the truth. I had sliced this tendon open at home, so I’d been in a splint for about 12 weeks, and I got it off the first morning of shooting James Bond.”

As a result, the 71-year-old star explained, he “could hardly move” his hand at all. 

“The very first shot is the camera following Robbie Coltrane, and he comes behind a curtain, and I point the gun to his head, and he says, ‘Only three men in the world own that weapon, and I’ve killed two of them.’ So we went for the take… and my finger went, ‘Toot!’ — like this,” Brosnan said, pretending to hold an imaginary weapon before his pinky finger flexed outward all by itself.

“Sorry! It’s okay!” he recalled saying at the time.

Brosnan then made a show of trying to squeeze his little finger back into place around the weapon. “I shouldn’t be even telling you this,” he admitted, “but anyway, Martin Campbell was the director and he said, ‘Let’s go again.’ Same line, finger just went like that.”

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To rectify the situation and nail the take, the super spy had to get a little crafty. “I got a Band-aid and I stuck it to the gun,” he said. “And that was it! Problem solved! Got through the day’s work.”

The 1995 movie GoldenEye — which also starred Sean Bean, Alan Cumming, and Dame Judi Dench — marked Brosnan’s debut outing as the martini-drinking MI6 agent. He would go on to reprise the role in another three films — 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, and 2002’s Die Another Day — before passing the torch to Daniel Craig. 

His comments come on the heels of Amazon’s February announcement of its joint venture with longtime Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli that will see the company take over creative control of the franchise moving forward. “[We] look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM, said in a statement at the time.

Watch Brosnan discuss his pinky problem — and solve — in the clip above.