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March 29, 2017
Features

A Man for All Seasons

After 30 years, the dashing Irishman who did four turns as Bond returns to series television in AMC’s The Son

Margy Rochlin

Pierce Brosnan spent part of his young boyhood in Navan, a small Irish town on the banks of the river Boyne, but his knowledge of early 20th-century Texas lore runs deep.

That’s because a good chunk of his childhood unfurled at the town’s two movie theaters — The Lyric and The Palace — where he watched classic cowboy sagas. “Going to the pictures was a magical delight,” Brosnan says, in his poetic Irish way. “The whole mythology of the Western is very much part of my own psyche.”

In The Son, AMC’s 10-episode sweeping family drama, Brosnan plays grizzled patriarch Eli McCullough, a Lone Star State oil baron. When he was offered the role, Brosnan knew exactly what to do. First, he reached out to his old friend Sam Neill, who’d originally been cast in the part, to ask for the New Zealand actor’s approval. It was readily granted.

Then, Brosnan put away his razor. “The beard progressively grows throughout the piece,” he explains. “So by episode 10, it’s a fairly big old piece of shrubbery around my face.” Based on Philipp Meyer’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated novel, The Son covers 150 years and three generations of the McCullough family.

“I grew very fond of the beard, and so did my wife.” When The Son’s two-hour premiere airs April 8 on AMC and SundanceTV, it will mark Brosnan’s first appearance on a television series in 30 years.

It was in spring 1987 that the final episode of Remington Steele aired on NBC. The highly rated private-eye series, which featured Brosnan as a one-time thief and rakishly handsome con man, introduced viewers everywhere to his comic physicality and toothy smile. Yet the show was a mixed blessing for its star.

Brosnan had arrived in the U.S. in 1981 as a promising young stage actor. He’d taken out a second mortgage on his London home so he and his wife could fly to Hollywood to promote his appearance in a six-hour ABC mini-series, The Manions of America. Good looks and dramatic versatility were enough to land him Remington Steele on his first audition of the trip.

He recalls fondly how the job reminded him of the nerve-shredding exhilaration of repertory theater, and also how it introduced him to the relentlessness and speed of creating 22 episodes a year.

As time passed, however, he’d begun to wonder where Remington Steele was taking him. “I could see that I was becoming this kind of pretty boy, that there was a certain kind of plastic quality to the performance,” Brosnan says.

He felt he was drifting farther and farther away from the ambitious, highly trained up-and-comer who’d once received a telegram from Tennessee Williams, thanking him for his performance in the British premiere of the legendary playwright’s The Red Devil Battery Sign.

“It wasn’t bad,” Brosnan says of Steele in its heyday, “but it wasn’t going in the direction that I’d envisioned, of strength, darkness and muscularity of performance. It was becoming light comedy.”

When viewership started to sag and NBC canceled the series, Brosnan was offered a feature film role he’d fixated on for years: James Bond. But fate took a strange twist: the prospect of Brosnan as a cuff-snapping 007 revived interest in Steele. Ratings improved during summer reruns, and, three days before the options on the show’s cast ended, the network put in an order for six more episodes.

“In the blink of an eye, with the speed of a flame, I was going to be Bond — and then I wasn’t Bond,” says the actor, still square-shouldered and dashing.

Unable to get out of his contract, he was forced to pass on The Living Daylights, which eventually starred Timothy Dalton. Brosnan got his break eight years later, reviving the Bond franchise with 1995’s GoldenEye, the first of his four starring roles as Ian Fleming’s super-agent. But losing that first shot soured him on television.

Fifteen years after his last Bond film (Die Another Day), a movie project had just fallen apart and Brosnan was feeling restless.

“I like to work,” he told his agent. “I don’t want to sit on my butt for the whole summer.” Soon thereafter, he received the scripts for the first five episodes of The Son. The series toggles between young Eli, kidnapped by Comanche Indians, and the adult Eli, a ruthless businessman. No one needed to convince Brosnan that television had for years been drawing gold-star talent.

“It’s a new age of TV — such rich characters, rich writing — it’s a very fertile time,” he says, adding that it wasn’t just the medium that had changed. “At this point in life, I don’t have any ego about wanting more screen time, more speeches, more dialogue. I’m there to be part of an ensemble and to play the role to the best of my abilities. And whoever wins the day — man, woman — hats off to them.”

Not much later, Philipp Meyer, an executive producer on the adaptation of his novel, was at CAA listening to Brosnan’s agent go through the motions of negotiating. Brosnan was clearly many eager steps ahead.

“His agent is like, ‘He’s very busy,’” Meyer recalls, “and Pierce is looking at me like, ‘We’re doing this, right? I’ve already started taking dialogue lessons.’” Meyer immediately began receiving texts from Brosnan that ranged from questions about Eli’s motivation to, “Hey, this line is a little too wordy.”

Later, during the long, shade-free, 105-degree days on location in Austin, Texas, Meyer would often find himself looking at Brosnan’s suggested tweaks and thinking, “Oh, he’s right.” He says now: “It was like he was teaching me about the craft of acting.”

Asked about the pains he took to get into character, Brosnan praises Meyer’s “gorgeous” prose, then gives much of the credit to his wardrobe and props. “Get a good hat, strap on a Colt, and you’re off to the races,” he says.

Though his years as Bond taught him solid gun skills, Brosnan neglects to mention that he did all his own stunts in The Son.

Meyer says the star is an “insane” equestrian: “The first night we were shooting, it was this very complicated scene where an oil rig blows up, and there’s people and cameras everywhere. And Pierce takes off on his horse, galloping into the night at full speed, where there’s no lights, into an empty field.”

Meyer pauses to imitate the stricken expressions of a handful of AMC executives watching their leading man speeding off into the dangerous, inky darkness. “Then Pierce comes galloping back and says, ‘This horse is fine, but he’s not really responding well.’ I thought, ‘Well, this guy is a badass.’”

Apart from the rollicking action, Brosnan felt a kinship with the rough-hewn, ever-striving patriarch.

“I am a father, a grandfather,” he says. He and his first wife, actress Cassandra Harris, had a son. After she passed away in 1991, he formally adopted her two children from another marriage. In 2001, he married American journalist Keely Shaye Smith, and they had two more children. When he says, “I know of life’s worth and sadness and disappointments,” the words speak volumes.

Like Eli, Brosnan is a self-made man. He was just an infant when his father walked out. The boy was shuttled between relatives in Ireland before his mother, who’d moved to southwest London, sent for him at age 10.

He never finished high school — he dropped out at 16 to work as an entry-level employee at an advertising company called Ravenna Studios. But every menial task gave young Pierce a sense of purpose.

“I’d draw straight lines, water the spider plants, make cups of tea for the other four guys and go to W.H. Smith’s and discover literature,” he says. “I just beamed with new life. I was over-the-moon happy.”

One day, as he was hanging up his coat at work, a friend told him about an acting workshop in the neighborhood. To this day, he can remember the thrill of his first foray into theatrical exercises: working his way through a room of people, eyes closed, humming loudly, with his hands outstretched.

“I thought, ‘Ah, this is great, man.’ And that was the birth of my acting. I went to workshops every night and learned tumbling, acrobatics and fire eating.” He made his first public stage performance in an impressionistic production of The Little Prince at Suffolk Cathedral. “My mom and [step]dad came,” Brosnan says. “I was 18 and I looked like I was 12.”

But there was no turning back after that. For three years, he trained at the Drama Centre London, so by the time he made his feature film debut as boyishly handsome IRA hitman #1 in the 1980 feature film The Long Good Friday , it didn’t matter that he’d never seen the script. All he needed was director John Mackenzie’s straightforward instructions.

“He said, ‘Jump in the pool. Pretend to pick up [a gangster’s cohort], go to kiss him and then stab him to death instead,’” says Brosnan, who absorbed a key lesson during his second scene: what sounds cool and what gets you more screen time aren’t always the same thing. In the final scene, two nameless IRA men (one of them Brosnan) whisk Bob Hoskins’s cockney mobster kingpin away, never to be seen again.

“I thought, ‘I want to drive the car. I want to drive the car.’ But John Mackenzie said, ‘You’re [the passenger in the front seat] with a gun,’” says Brosnan, who was dejected until he saw the final cut.

Though you see the driver’s eyes several times, it’s Brosnan who gets the chillingly memorable close-up as he silently, menacingly waves his firearm. “In the end, the scene is just about Hoskins and myself.” (And in true movie-magic form, Brosnan’s and Hoskins’s close-ups were shot separately — the two never met.)

Last year, when Brosnan first strode onto the set of The Son, every member of the crew and cast, right down to 13-year-old Sydney Lucas, could feel that, even after 37 years of film and television experience, the actor thinks movie-star airs are for rookies — a smart leading man just wants to be a part of the gang.

“Pierce likes to hang around and get to know everyone,” says Lucas, who plays his granddaughter, Jeannie McCullough, who brings out Eli’s softest side.

With her Broadway background (Fun Home), Lucas didn’t miss the opportunity to take what she called “a master class in acting” from her versatile costar. “I’d watch Pierce. He was so intense. Like, he’d do a subtle thing with his eyes and it would change everything.”

Years from now, Lucas might reflect back and realize that Brosnan also gave her an education in stealth chemistry building. “He’s very playful. I taught him all of the coolest dance moves — Whip/Nae Nae and the Dap — and now I want to teach him JuJu on That Beat,” Lucas says. “He’s really good.”

Back in 1996, when Brosnan was feeling creatively adrift, he and his then-partner, the late Beau St. Clair, formed a production company. Irish DreamTime developed, among other projects, The Thomas Crown Affair remake (1999) and The Matador (2005).

“It gave me a sense of self-worth and of possibilities,” he recalls. He’s now developing a screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees with Crown Affair director Martin Campbell.

“I’m at a point in my life where I just love being an actor,” Brosnan says. He’ll star this year alongside Jackie Chan in a British-Chinese action-thriller titled The Foreigner — also directed by Campbell.

“I have a want and a desire to get better as an entertainer, as a performer. There’s a wonderful grace and contentment with being who I am. Not satisfied by all of my work, but by always feeling challenged.”


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 2, 2017 

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