‘I don’t let regret in’: Pierce Brosnan on love, loss and his life after Bond
I am 10 minutes into my Zoom interview with Pierce Brosnan when his son Dylan arrives off-screen with his father’s coffee. “Did you put sugar in this?” he says to the 23-year-old. “Some more milk, please, I don’t take mine black.” Dylan is sent back to correct it.
“He’s a wonderful musician and a great academic,” Brosnan says. “He just graduated from USC film school.” The graduation, like so many others, was cancelled. “We got him a cap and gown and sat here watching it [the online ceremony] on the sofa”.
Naturally, the pandemic has disrupted Brosnan’s schedule, too; he was shooting Cinderella in London until Covid-19 halted production. He returned to the northern shore of Hawaii, where he has remained since with his wife, the journalist and author Keely Shaye Smith, and their two sons, Dylan and Paris, 19. (Brosnan also has three children from his first marriage.)
“We are a close family and this time of covid has nourished and nurtured a bond between us all that probably would not have existed without the lockdown,” he says.
Brosnan is sitting at his kitchen table, in front of a bright Indigenous Australian painting, which he bought in Sydney during a “tour of duty” as James Bond.
He is here to talk about his supporting role in the Netflix film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. The film, which was originally scheduled to coincide with this year’s contest, follows two would-be pop stars (Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams) in their quest to represent Iceland in a fictionalised version of the competition.
There was hopeful expectation in some quarters that Brosnan might lend his singing voice, given his infamous performances in the Mamma Mia! films (his singing in the first film was so comical that it landed him the Razzie
for worst supporting actor at the 2009 awards). Was he shocked not to be given the chance to sing on screen again? “I was surprised, I was disappointed, I was crestfallen,” he responds, good-naturedly.
Brosnan plays Ferrell’s disparaging father (“Which I thought was a bit of a long shot”), who resents his son’s wild ambitions and wants him to aspire to a more conventional future. It is not a parenting style familiar to Brosnan. “My boys are academic and have a creative instinct and intuition towards the arts. So I don’t try to direct them.”
His younger sons’ careers in filmmaking, acting (Dylan) and modelling (Paris) have seen them amass their own fame; they have social media followings in the tens of thousands. They stole the show at this year’s Golden Globes in their roles as ambassadors, shepherding celebrities on and off stage in black tie. Does their social media fame worry him?
“Yes, it does concern my wife, Keely, and I,” he says. “The footprint that they’re leaving will stay with them for many years to come. It’s treacherous waters. I went on Instagram to follow Paris, to make sure that he was acquitting himself well and not entering into any kind of liaisons with folk of ill repute. It’s a strange animal and you have to be careful with it. It can be narcissistic and you have to balance it out with human lightness.”
Born in 1953, Brosnan was raised in Navan, 30 miles north-west of Dublin. An only child, he has described his childhood as a solitary, Roman Catholic upbringing. “My father took off for the hills and, for my mother, it was a very difficult time in the 50s to be a single parent. So, in many respects, I created my own self,” he says.
After his father left, his mother moved to London when Brosnan was four. She wanted a better life for them. He waited for her in Ireland and lived in a succession of houses – with his maternal grandparents’, with his aunt and uncle, at a boarding house.
“I’m very grateful that I didn’t have the shackles of parenting, so to speak, and really cleaved my own path in life. When, as a young teenager, I told my mother that I wanted to be an actor, she was extremely supportive of that. She wholeheartedly said: ‘Follow your dreams.’”
Brosnan moved to Putney in west London when he was 12. At school, he was nicknamed Irish. “Being an Irish immigrant in London in ’64, they don’t let you forget that.” He later worked briefly as a commercial artist, but, having been raised on “cowboys and Indians, Old Mother Riley, Norman Wisdom”, he still dreamed of acting.
Brosnan stumbled upon the Ovalhouse theatre in south London and found himself “in the company of poets and musicians and outcasts and mangled souls”. His breakthrough came when he landed a small part in a Tennessee Williams play, The Red Devil Battery Sign, as the understudy.
“It didn’t work out for this other fellow,” says Brosnan. “I got the call: ‘Tennessee wants to see you now.’ I tore out of the flat and hopped on a bus. The bus was going too slow, so I got off and ran. My heart was pounding – Tennessee Williams wants to see me. I got to Tennessee’s apartment, and we read through two very emotional scenes and just let it fly. And I got the job.”
They opened at the Roundhouse theatre in north London in 1977, with Brosnan’s performance receiving critical acclaim. Williams sent him a telegram stating only: “Thank God for you, my dear boy.”
“It was an affirmation that I was on the right path, that I had the talent – a tiny bit of gold in my back pocket,” says Brosnan. “That made me hungry to be an actor. Once I found the world of acting, I clung to it with all my heart. It was liberating.”
It was a hugely successful start to a stage career, but Brosnan’s ambitions lay elsewhere. “I always dreamed of the movies,” he says. “The stage, as exhilarating as it was, always terrified me. I wanted to be up on the silver screen.”
In 1982, he landed the role of the charming TV detective Remington Steele. He moved to California with his first wife, the Australian actor Cassandra Harris, and their son, Sean, and her two children, Charlotte and Christopher, whom Brosnan later adopted. In 1987, Harris fell ill while filming in India and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died four years later. Charlotte would die of the same disease in 2013.
Brosnan turned to the therapeutic qualities of painting while Harris was ill and he has continued ever since. “I started painting in 1987 when my late wife had cancer. I had been painting out of pain, and now the pain sometimes comes through in colour,” he said at the charity auction of his painting of Bob Dylan in 2018. It sold for €1.2m (£1.1m).
He found the fortitude to keep acting, too. In 1993, he made it on to the silver screen in Mrs Doubtfire. “At day’s end, you want to look around and hopefully
10 films, with the hope that more diverse films will receive nominations as a result.
The Academy is composed of more than 8,000 voting members, and 2,000 new members have been added in the past three years. While still predominantly white and male, a 2018 study found that the new additions did increase diversity, with people of color making up 16% of members in 2018, up from 8% in 2015.
The changes appear to be having an impact. This year, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite became the first non-Englishlanguage film to win Best Picture, while Moonlight, a film focused on the black male queer experience, nabbed Best Picture in 2017 and was hailed as a breakthrough by critics. But not every recent win has been seen as progressive; 2019’s Best Picture winner, The Green Book, was accused of being “racially tone deaf ”.
The 2020 list also includes a diverse swath of people from all sectors of the industry, from acting to publicity to costume design. Invited actors include
Ana De Armas, Brian Tyree Henry, Florence Pugh, Lakeith Stanfield, Beanie Feldstein. Directors such as Lulu Wan, Ari Aster, Terence Davies and Matthew
Vaughn are also on the list.
A handful of actors from Parasite, including Jang Hye-jin, Jo Yeo-jeong, Park So-dam and Lee Jung-eun, were also invited to join. The Academy said that 49% of the new invitees are international and represent some 68 countries.
The Academy president, David Rubin, said that the organization is “delighted to welcome these distinguished fellow travelers in the motion picture arts and sciences”.
The Academy has also announced a new five-year plan that includes implementing inclusion standards for nominees.
“We look forward to continuing to foster an Academy that reflects the world around us in our membership, our programs, our new Museum, and in our awards,” said the academy CEO, Dawn Hudson, in a written statement.
“Very excited to be a new member of @Academy with so many brilliant minds,” Lulu Wang, director of The Farewell, wrote on Twitter. “Though there is still much work to be done, this class looks more like an actual jury of our PEERS than ever before, so that’s a step in the right direction. Onwards!”
The 93rd Academy Awards are set to take place on 25 April 2021, two months later than originally planned due to Covid-19’s effects on the industry.