Pierce Brosnan Knows What it Takes to Become Rabid

Paramount+7 min readPierce Brosnan can’t deny it. He’s one debonair son of a bitch.007. Remington Steele. The architect heartthrob in Mamma Mia. Brosnan doesn’t dispute the characterization of his screen presence. In fact, he adds another title to the list. “Thomas Crown…” he says, sitting on an outdoor deck at the London hotel in West Hollywood as the sun begins to set. It’s not all an act: “I love clothes. I love style. I love the joy of that romantic lifestyle and those movies. It's a part of me as an actor.” But he’s done that long enough. “You then have to dismantle it,” he says.MobLand has allowed him to lean into the profane part of that identity, shoving aside the savoir faire and letting him bare his teeth and empty his clips with ruthless abandon. His gang leader Conrad Harrigan was always explosively unpredictable in the Paramount+ series, but with season 2 now underway viewers are seeing Brosnan’s character fray at the edges as he becomes ever more chaotic and bloodthirsty.“He's dangerous. He has a short fuse. And now, as we begin to see in episode 2, he's been diagnosed with this mental disfigurement of his brain and his psyche,” Brosnan tells Esquire.In the latest episode, titled “Song 2,” Conrad gets a troubling diagnosis from his doctor. An MRI has detected “focal atrophy in the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus.” In layman’s terms, the parts of his brain that regulate impulse control, aggression, and the fight-or-flight mechanism are breaking down, which adds a new dimension to Conrad’s recent mad-dog behavior. As if to demonstrate the corrosion of his better judgment, Conrad reacts by threatening to murder the trembling doctor.Brosnan notes a hint of vulnerability in the gangster before he lashes out. “He's still a gnarly, mangled, toxic, aggressive Irishman,” the actor says. “But it is a good scene, I must say. Everything goes back to the writing of [showrunner] Jez Butterworth. He writes these nuanced, lyrical, heightened dramas, which are almost like Jacobean drama, which is very graphic and brutal.”Conrad hasn’t yet wandered madly into the wild heath outside his stately country home like King Lear, but he does have Helen Mirren’s gangster moll Maeve pouring poisonous thoughts into his ear nonstop. “She knows his buttons,” Brosnan says. “She knows she's Lady Macbeth.”Now it’s clear to both Conrad and MobLand’s viewers why he keeps rejecting advice to keep his rage in check. In episode 1 of the new season, a business partner’s casual insult resulted in a bullet-riddled bloodbath at the racing track, even as his henchmen pleaded with him to hold back. It’s beginning to make sense why Conrad has been leaving so many gruesome messes for Tom Hardy’s family fixer to clean up.In another patient, this medical news might simply be the tragic mark of early dementia. In Conrad, this diagnosis is a bright red, flashing warning light. To rise to such a position of power, the kingpin must have once modulated his brutality with shrewd and patient calculation. But those days are over.Brosnan’s time as a savage, meanwhile, is just getting started.Paramount+“He’s dangerous,” Brosnan says of his MobLand character, Conrad Harrigan. “He has a short fuse.”With eight more episodes to come in season 2, MobLand has already received an order for season 3. There’s not much hope that Conrad’s sense of propriety will improve in that time, so count on a lot more volatility, a lot more violence, and a bigger heap of bodies before it’s all said and done.Brosnan, now 73, says Conrad emerged from him in a primal way. “Oh dear. It's very hard to express how I work as this character because it's so much on instinct and impulse,” he says. “There is no real deep kind of investigation of the text on my behalf—or Helen's behalf. We come together as actors and it just appears before us, these characters.”He described it as almost trance-like. “You go home at the end of the day and you think, ‘What did I do today? How did that happen?’”There was significant preparation, of course, especially at the beginning. Guy Ritchie, a veteran of British underworld stories with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, RocknRolla, and the TV series The Gentlemen, set the tone for MobLand as its inaugural director, and Brosnan says the filmmaker gave him a wide range to interpret Conrad.That itself was a bit unsettling. His criminal pater familias was forged from a bit of uncertainty. “We started talking about Conrad and where he was from, North London, South London, Irish? He said, ‘Look, don't worry about it. We'll sort it out on the day,’” Brosnan recalls. “Of course, I did worry about it. On the day of filming, five weeks later, he said, ‘Go mad. Go Irish. Play it to the hilt.’ And that's what I did.”But first he had to find the right voice, and he had to do it in a hurry. Cameras were ready to roll. Brosnan was born and raised in Ireland, but he wanted something rougher than his own brogue. “My Irish accent is so buried in California and England as a young actor that on that day, I called up my dialect coach, my good friend who is a dialect coach, Brendan Gunn,” Brosnan recalls. “I said, ‘Brendan, I’ve got 20 minutes. I need a Kerry accent.’”County Kerry is in the jagged southwestern corner of Ireland, a lush rural land known for its livestock farming. It’s muddy, difficult labor, and Brosnan imagined it as the starting point for Conrad, who traded it for a different kind of dirty work. “That comes from some abstract image of a barbaric pig farmer who comes from a mangled, abused background,” he says.[Conrad Harrigan] lived with desperation most of his life, desperation of wanting to fit in, desperation of wanting to be ahead of the game.He also imagined a “political background, a patriotic background of war in the streets,” Brosnan says, invoking the decades of internal violent conflict that divided Ireland from the 1960s through the 1990s. “Maeve and Conrad grew up during the Troubles, during the bombings. So you take these flashes, these images you get, and he's wound up in them.”There was also a personal connection that made Brosnan choose that particular Irish county for Conrad. “My father, my old man, Tom Brosnan—who I never knew—was from Kerry. He was a Kerryman. Brosnan's a Kerry name,” he says. “I instinctively said, ‘I need a Kerry accent.’”His coach suggested he look at a politician who served that region named Michael Healy-Rae. “He said, ‘Check out this fellow on YouTube. And I looked at this guy and listened to him, and I thought: ‘I'll go with that.’ I've now got 15 minutes!”He spent that quarter of an hour mimicking Healy-Rae’s musical rise-and-fall while reciting an especially vulgar and combative line that had to emerge from Conrad’s mouth that day. “There was a speech on day one of filming with Tom where [Conrad] has a speech saying, ‘If I'm bigger than you, stronger than you, I’ll eat you. Or I’ll fuck you. And then I’ll eat you.’” Brosnan slips effortlessly into the voice, which hisses out between his teeth. “It's just such a graphically beautiful, funny line,” he says.Brosnan gets his own back up when our conversation turns to rumors of discord on the set and trade reports that Hardy came close to being fired after clashing with producers. “We as a company of actors were very strong, very tight,” Brosnan says. “So I think there was a lot of bullshit going on. To this day, I don't know how it snowballed into this major story. Tom is an amazing actor. Tom is someone who really is captivating, spellbinding, a powerhouse of a performer and is a sweetheart of a guy. He's such a charming man.”He pushes back on those reports, saying he never saw any disagreements. “I was in shock. My son sent me a text. I was on vacation and he sent me a [message] that this had happened. So I reached out to Tom,” Brosnan says. “I don't know where it came from, how it came about, but Tom is MobLand. We collectively are MobLand.”Karwai Tang//Getty Images“We as a company of actors were very strong, very tight,” Brosnan says of his MobLand costars Helen Mirren and Tom Hardy.There’s an irony to Brosnan going feral at a time when most other actors would be mellowing into wise old man territory. Conrad appeals to the actor precisely because he is unsettled, unhappy and unhinged.“He tries to be a country gentleman,” Brosnan says, with emphasis on the “tries.” “He's lived with desperation most of his life, desperation of wanting to fit in, desperation of wanting to be ahead of the game. He has charm, and he has presence, and a strong motivation to win you over, but beneath all of that is this man who is, and as you see, coming to a point in his life where mortality is circling the wagons.”For most of his career, Brosnan has portrayed the opposite kind of character—the sophisticated gentleman. One of his first film roles was 1980’s The Long Good Friday, a movie full of gritty London underworld figures (including Helen Mirren) who would fit right in with the characters of MobLand. Brosnan didn’t have any lines as the film’s silent Grim Reaper, but he was nonetheless ultra cool and elegant.That’s how Hollywood kept seeing him. Brosnan acknowledges “having created such an image for myself, which happened when I came here to this landscape of Los Angeles and Hollywood and moved into a house literally just up the road with my family back in 1982, doing Remington Steele. Bob Butler was the director and he said, ‘We're doing an old movie.’ And I just threw myself into the world of Cary Grant.”On that show, he was the ultra-slick faceman of a private detective agency, which eventually led to his casting as James Bond, a defining role for every actor who inhabits it. Brosnan was always keen to break out and show a different side, as he did with his flamboyant, anxiety-ridden hitman in 2005’s The Matador, which for the longest time was his wildest performance.MobLand may have finally given him the chance to go even further. “It goes back to Guy giving me the carte blanche to just explode,” Brosnan says. “No holds barred.”