Pierce Brosnan: “Acting is really a difficult job, it’s a cross to bear: you have to constantly reinvent yourself”

IN 2018, WHEN FRIENDS OF DYLAN BROSNAN burst into his home for his 21st birthday, they were flabbergasted to discover that his father was Pierce Brosnan. “It’s true,” confirms Dylan with a laugh. “I don’t tell anyone. Never.” It’s a hot but windy afternoon in the
Malibu home that Dylan’s parents, Pierce and his second wife, Keely Shaye Smith, have owned since their marriage in 2001. On a sofa in the living room, Dylan watches the blue sky and sea through the window. He tells me about his childhood, and about growing up with a father everyone knew. “Since people constantly approached him in the street and that he always took the time to talk to them, I thought he had plenty of friends.”
Dylan, born in 1997, is now 25 years old. His early childhood coincided with Pierce Brosnan’s greatest hits – the 007s and Thomas Crown. Later, when he tells his father about it – “Do you remember your friend there? The one who dressed haphazardly and hung out near the cinema?” – he will understand that these “friends” were actually strangers. Fans, mostly. And sometimes genuine crackpots. A silver-haired Pierce Brosnan joins us in khaki shorts
and old white t-shirt. “Today, he announces, I have nothing planned apart from this interview. When we’re done, I’ll pour myself a cocktail and go watch the pelicans on the shore.”

He will be 70 next year. Time has softened her face, less severe but still just as beautiful. Later, I’ll feel compelled to ask him, “Tell me, Pierce, when did you realize you were such a handsome man?” He laughs loudly, then politely refuses to answer. What could he tell me? This face he was born with, just like the birthmark on his left arm. “My grandmother always said, ‘This task is a lucky charm. You my little one, you are going to have
luck in life.’” He shrugs. “So far, we can’t say that she was wrong.” Dylan went to high school and college in Los Angeles, but before that he and his brother Paris, now 21, split their lives between Malibu and the family home in Hawaii. The latter provided them with an almost normal daily life, which Dylan compares to the film Stand by Me. surfing and all that. I was going back to Malibu for a few days and then I was going back.” At school, these trips back and forth give him a mysterious aura. “The others said to me: ‘Ah yes, it’s you… We were together in CM2 for a week, and then you disappeared.’
When they were younger, Dylan and Paris also spent time on set with dad – Dylan remembers exploring the ice palace in Die another day – and, as adults, they both worked behind the scenes of his movies. But their father always advised them against acting. “It’s really a tough job,” Pierce Brosnan explains to me, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s a cross to bear: you have to constantly reinvent yourself.”