Bond star Brosnan reflects on life’s challenges
PASADENA, California — It’s hard to believe, but the man we know as the dashing James Bond once cleaned kitchens for a living. Pierce Brosnan, who insinuated himself on a grateful public as 007 in four Bond movies, also toiled in a plastic bottles factory. “I worked as a labourer digging roads with my fellow Irishmen,” he adds over breakfast in a sunny patio café here.
“We’d get up at 4:30 in the morning, get into an old bus — a bunch of paddies who were completely inebriated still from the night before — and go dig ditches, with Chekhov in my back pocket,” he says.
He still has Chekhov in his back pocket, as well as some sort of special grit. In spite of enormous tragedy in his life, Brosnan prevails with what he calls “the luck of the Irish.”
Following the death of his first wife, Cassie, and his adopted daughter, Charlotte, from ovarian cancer, last year Brosnan lost his longtime producing partner, Beau St. Claire, another victim of cancer.
He and his current wife, Keely Shaye, suffered a fire at their Malibu home in which the book Brosnan was reading went up in flames. But that book has survived in another form as Brosnan’s next role on television.
On April 8 he’ll star in AMC’s 10-part saga, The Son, based on Philipp Meyer’s engrossing novel about six generations of the McCullough family in Texas. Brosnan plays the patriarch of the clan, who is torn as he watches the landscape he’s known erode.
Though change has been a constant in his life, Brosnan has learned to thrive on it. He was separated from his mother for five years as a kid when she moved to England to become a nurse.
While he attended Catholic school in Ireland he was abused by his Christian Brothers teachers, he recalls. “They would make you bend over and cane you. I had slaps on the hand, thumps on the head, kicks in the backside, while or during or after saying the ‘Our Father’ by some Christian Brother who didn’t get out much and had no sensibility of humanity. Thank God for acting because when I discovered acting, I discovered this wonderful world,” he says.
He reconnected with his mother at 11 when he joined her in England. He was bullied there at school because he was an outsider. “Trying to fit in then in 1964 in the English comprehensive school system was not easy,” he smiles.
“So being the token Irish lad was not easy. There was a certain discrimination, and I was the butt of quite a few jokes. They could never find the way to say my name or couldn’t say my name, or didn’t want to say the name, ‘Pierce,’ so I was known as ‘Irish’ throughout my years. And I wore that as a badge and an emblem of great dignity. I liked the mystique of it. You learn at an early age to roll with the punches and find your way through the day [with] a sense of humour,” he says.
Fisticuffs were part of it, he says. “You had to defend yourself, so you had to land the first punch and you had to be pretty fast and swift. But I was not a fighter, I was really not. But I had to defend myself. I got in trouble early on at school over a girl because I liked this particular girl . ... She was a lovely girl, but this other fellow made fun of her, so I clocked him.
“And then they took me away to give me six of the best. But I was already used to being hit by the Christian Brothers and getting the snot kicked out of you by these holy men. But it didn’t bother me so I backed into this persona of being a hard man.”