Pierce Brosnan Is Effortlessly Charming. So Why Would He Want to Be Anyone Else?
The former Bond star discusses Daniel Craig's acting chops, painting, and his first time meeting Robin Williams.
By Gabrielle Bluestone
May 29, 2019
A few days before Pierce Brosnan’s oil-and-acrylic portrait of Bob Dylan sold for an astounding $1.4 million at an amfAR charity auction last year in Cannes, the painting was mysteriously lost. As the event’s organizers panicked, Brosnan realized something surprising: He was rather happy it was gone.
Before the auction, few people knew that Brosnan—who studied commercial illustration in college and worked at an advertising firm in his early years in London—was an artist. It’s a longstanding passion of his, and a creative outlet he’s credited with helping him recover from the 1991 death of his first wife, Cassandra. But it’s also one he feels ambivalent about displaying publicly, even today.
“I love to paint. I don't paint enough. I have a body of work that I wish to show, expose, exhibit. There's been word of doing an exhibit in Paris. That's been talked about. I don't know,” Brosnan says. “I think if I do an exhibit, I feel it should be in Los Angeles. Have a showing. Turn the lights down low. Have some margaritas and some wine, good music.”
Then again, Brosnan has been publicly bandying about the exhibition idea for more than a year now, and when and if it’ll ultimately happen is anyone’s guess. So it makes sense that when the oil-and-acrylic Dylan painting disappeared last year in Cannes, Brosnan reacted much like his playboy art thief character in the Thomas Crown Affair did to the destruction of a minor Renoir—which is to say, not at all.
“We got to Cannes, and they lost it. For two days, it was lost,” Brosnan says. “I was kind of mildly relieved, actually, strangely so.”
After a beat, Brosnan summarizes the events that followed—a self-proclaimed Ukrainian billionaire, best-known for allegedly buying a home and contractual friendship from Kim Kardashian, paying more than a million dollars for his art— in less than 10 words.
“They found it, and the night was the night,” he says.
But that’s just Pierce. Offer him a compliment, and he’s likely to groan and tell you someone else who he thinks deserves it more. Sure, he’s a devoted environmentalist, but he’s the first (and perhaps only person) to note that he’s not eloquent about it in a political way like George Clooney and Ted Danson. He has fun with his posts on social media, but if we’re being honest, Anthony Hopkins is really the master of the genre. (On this, he is correct.) There’s no denying he’s enjoyed a successful acting career spanning decades, but have you seen Daniel Craig do it live on Broadway?
This particular Craig deflection is unexpected, given Brosnan’s newfound reluctance to talk about the James Bond franchise in the wake of a frank 2018 interview, where he expressed his dissatisfaction with the series’ tonal shift from winking humor to muscle-driven action. His current take on the Bond movies is, in fact, the sole question on which he declines to comment, saying only, “Not my monkey, not my circus.”
But it turns out Brosnan’s got nothing but unprompted praise for its current lion tamer, which reveals itself midway through our interview.
“I must say, I do admire Daniel, as in Craig. I admire him for his work, his Bond movies. He's such a great actor. He's done such a magnificent job. But that he went out on stage and did his plays...” Brosnan says, letting the sentence trail off.
Now Brosnan, soft-spoken and lyrical with that distinctive Irish lilt, sounds wistful. We’ve just been talking about the possibility of him performing something live again, and he dreamily recounts the experimental work he did as a youth in London, fire breathing for tourists and performing workshops of plays like The Little Prince. Naturally, Brosnan played the prince, though he insists he was typecast, saying, “I looked like I was 12. I had long hair and I was a pretty little boy.”
So, debating it out loud, Brosnan says he likes the idea of doing something on Broadway—in theory.
“It's finding the right material. It's just a certain desire. I might never go back to the stage. I enjoyed it when I was there. It's bloody hard work. Seven shows a week,” Brosnan says. “Maybe I'll just do a run for seven days. I'll just do a run for a week. Can I do one week? Let me be Craig for one night. Yeah. That would be kind of cool.”
In the meantime, he’s happy to just beat himself up about what he’s not doing.
“I feel very angry with myself that I don't have the balls to get out there and do it. You have to really want it. You have to really want it,” he says.
To Brosnan’s credit, however, he may be one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood. With a career spanning more than four decades and 89 screen credits, he’s most famous now for his iconic turns as James Bond, Thomas Crown, and the singing and dancing love of Meryl Streep’s life in Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. But he also wrapped a whopping 14 films and two seasons of television in the last five years alone, with six more projects in the works, according to IMDb.
Brosnan’s breakout film role came back in 1993, where he took the role of Stu, the charmingly romantic foil to Robin Williams, in Mrs. Doubtfire.
"Pierce is perfect, in every way. During all the months of shooting Mrs. Doubtfire I never knew which man I was more in love with, Robin or Pierce,” the actress Sally Field recalls from London, where she’s performing a run of All My Sons at the Old Vic. “Luckily, I didn't have to choose. I got to be around them both."
“[Robin] was brilliant. Sally was gorgeous. She and I got on like gas on fire,” Brosnan says. “It was so delightfully enchanting. It was just delightful.”
On one of his first days in San Francisco—he fondly recalls staying at the now-shuttered Sherman House—Brosnan went down to the set, “And they said, ‘Do you want to meet Robin Williams?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I went into the makeup trailer and Robin was there. He was sitting at the end of the trailer in his Hawaiian shirt and his big hairy arms, and his hairy legs coming out of his cargo pants. But he had the head of Mrs. Doubtfire.”
Brosnan continues—and it is important to note this—in a perfect imitation of Robin Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire voice.
“He said, ‘Pierce. Oh Pierce. Oh, you're so handsome. Oh, look at ya, Pierce. Oh, give us a kiss. Come here, give us a hug.’”
Now he switches back to his normal voice. “His humanity was so far reaching, and joy of people, and love of life, bountiful,” Brosnan says. “Oh, Robin, still, his passing still hurts deeply. I miss him.”
And Brosnan? Well Brosnan endures. This month, he’s gearing up to play an OB-GYN in False Positive, a horror comedy filming in New York with Justin Theroux and Ilana Glazer, and he’s out lunching with strangers in an effort to promote the second and final season of AMC’s The Son, in which he stars as an Irish-American Texas rancher who will stop at nothing to protect his legacy and his loved ones. The TV role, which required him to ride around on horseback in the heat of the Austin sun, was hard work. This languorous meal, on the other hand, is torture.
I know this because Pierce Brosnan is the kind of guy who will tell you right to your face he doesn’t want to be there—and still manage to make it sound downright charming.
“I went out the door saying, ‘I hate these fucking things. I hate these.’ I've got nothing to say,’” Brosnan says.
Of course, he’s also just spent more than an hour talking about a number of topics at a beachfront restaurant in Malibu, sipping Aperol spritzes and politely answering every single one of my questions—even the two I promised were both the last one. More than politely. Respectfully, even. Because what Brosnan means when he says he has “nothing to say” is that he has nothing new to offer the public on the subject of Pierce Brosnan.
“I used to love talking, and I'd talk and talk, but I've kind of run out of things to say, really,” Brosnan says. “I tell the same story over and over again.”
Still, Brosnan has a way of processing any number of inane inquiries into a sort of erudite metaphysical treatise. He takes his time speaking, leaving pregnant pauses as he appears to sift through his thoughts much like a performative oenophile might sip at a wine tasting—only on him, it doesn’t come off as pretentious. I can only imagine what his conversations must be like when he’s not being interrogated by a writer.
Even now, in the middle of admitting how much he’d rather be anywhere else, he’s offering his captor her choice from his side order of fries and reassuring her that if he has to be here talking with the press, “I’m glad it’s you and not some crusty old… whoever.” It’s not me, he’s saying, it’s him.
“My job is to act. My job is to go find work as an actor, paint, get on the stage, get off the stage, and hopefully, do something that's entertaining,” Brosnan says. “I wish I could be more eloquent. I wish I could just give you answers to all of this, or even to my own questions, my own self.”
In the meantime, the secret to his success, he says dryly, is, “I keep showing up. I'm still at the table, as it were.”
“I don't read. I don't look. I do the job. I move on. I hear some of it. The bad stuff sticks with you. I can quote it. The good stuff I don't believe,” Brosnan says. “That's why I love acting. I get to just be someone else. I don't have to be me. Or, I can be me in the guise of a different kind of me.”
Brosnan is the first to admit he doesn’t enjoy selling himself, be it in an interview or an audition, explaining he sits somewhere in the “duality between modesty and arrogance and an abundance of confidence and that dark dog that sits beside you, saying, ‘Try harder. Be better.’”
“But I'm not a tortured soul. I love what I do,” Brosnan quickly adds. “I've gotten away with it gloriously and I intend to keep going, as long as I can do so, to be an actor, to have your art appreciated, to be challenged. To show the arts.”
Despite his robust filming schedule, acting and painting are not, in fact, Brosnan’s only creative outlets. He’s currently working on a memoir, which has brought its own pressures—“When you're writing, you find yourself. You find... am I gonna put that down? Am I really gonna speak that truth to myself, to that boy, to that young man, to that man, to this man? How entertaining do you want to be? I'm not sure.”
It’s hard to imagine Brosnan not being entertaining. He’s open about his interior life, and he slips naturally into fascinating anecdotes, like a doomed downtown New York hotel recommendation from his friend Julianne (Moore), or the time he heard the news about John Belushi’s fatal overdose. He had just started filming Remington Steele on the CBS lot in 1982, leaving his then-wife Cassandra and their two kids behind at the Chateau Marmont.
“I went upstairs to the room, turned on the TV, and there was our son hanging off the lamp post outside the bungalow as John's body was coming out the door,” Brosnan said. “It was like a welcome to L.A. moment.”
Another welcome to L.A. moment? Being perpetually unsure whether his home will burn down or not. Schrodinger had his cat; Brosnan has Malibu. He’s currently living in a rental property after the Camp Fire blazed through the coast last November, causing more than $1 million in damage to his home and destroying a custom 2002 Aston Martin handbuilt for him after he drove it to fame in the 2002 James Bond film, Die Another Day. Brosnan was in the driveway watching as the car caught fire.
“In that nanosecond, you think, do I try to save it? But it’s just a car. You take the blow and move on, give thanks you’re alive,” he told Details magazine at the time. Now he’s wondering if he should just give up and move somewhere north.
“We are, if you can believe it, at some kind of tipping point, because of the fires, which they call the new normal. But the fires are not the new normal. They're the new abnormal,” Brosnan says. “Having been affected by the Malibu fires, many times, and now more pointedly than ever, where do you go? Fire season will still keep coming around, in search of dense growth of forestry in our lands here. They will come back and the temperatures keep rising.”
But if the way he’s handled the turbulence in his personal life is any indication, he’ll stick it out in some way or form. Brosnan endured decades of tragedy after tragedy in the public eye, and he’s still here, plugging away—even after his late wife, Cassandra, died in 1991 of ovarian cancer, the same disease that claimed his stepdaughter, Charlotte, in 2013. Even after he had to cut off his stepson Christopher in the mid-aughts after years of addiction, and after his oldest son, Sean, battled his own addictions that reportedly developed after he was injured in a 2000 car accident off the side of a Malibu cliff. But Brosnan, he stuck it out and things got better: he and Christopher now have “a loving communication,” and he says Sean is thriving, studying for a psychology degree and starting a family.
“Sean has the most beautiful daughter that I am grandpa to. I try to have some lyrical name, Poppy, Hemingway-esque, but I am grandpa. Grandpa. Grandpa. There comes a time to be a grandpa. I am that,” Brosnan says. And with his two youngest sons, Dylan, a 22-year-old USC graduate, and Paris, an 18-year-old runway model, now starting their own lives as adults, Brosnan finally has the time to do it.
Maintaining that is the real reason he’s here today, bringing out the old stories once again in advance of his latest project. And he’ll keep gamely showing up as long as he’s got a working voice and a willing ear.
“I found myself on many a stage and platform, thinking, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I know the reasons why. They're all beneficial to our lives, as a couple, and to our children, and the betterment of our world. It brings great stability to my life and comfort to my life, and love and a great sense of wellbeing,” Brosnan says. “I'm beginning to wear my years. I'm beginning to show my years. I'm beginning feel my years. I'm beginning to love my years. Time, time past, time present, time future. Time. With all of that, comes lovely, joyful, wellbeing. You hold that for a little while, and then, there's just work to be done.”
Photography by Steven Taylor • Styling by Wendi and Nicole • Grooming by David Cox at Art Department
