"Shall we talk about what I do about those bloody Mexicans? How I keep those troublemakers out?" Pierce Brosnan says as the television in the lounge of the Soho House outpost in Malibu loops the news that Mexico's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has canceled his planned visit with Donald Trump.

As Brosnan points us toward a sun-drenched corner table overlooking the Pacific, I ask what his brand of border enforcement entails. "String them up and torture them, hang them, take their property," he says, letting loose a dark laugh.

To be fair, he isn't talking about himself but rather his latest character. On the dark, violent, blisteringly intense The Son (debuting April 8), AMC's adaptation of Philipp Meyer's 2013 novel, he plays Eli McCullough, the patriarch of a south Texas dynasty shifting from cattle into the oil business as the Mexican Revolution rages across the border. McCullough is the type of man who hangs one Mexican ranch hand and flays another after their political activities collide with his ambitions.

"Rather more relevant than we ever expected, isn't it?" Brosnan says, arching an eyebrow.

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As the title suggests, The Son concerns the fraught legacies passed from father to son, including the scars inflicted by Eli's absent father. "I know what it's like to bring up sons"—Brosnan, sixty-three, has four of them—"and it can be a very arduous road," he says. "My fatherly instincts are purely my own. They relate back to no one, because there was no one."

"My fatherly instincts are purely my own. They relate back to no one, because there was no one."

His father abandoned the family when Brosnan was an infant in a small riverside village in Ireland. His mother left for London to find work; he lived with his relatives and then shared a room in a boardinghouse. "There were two lodgers—workingmen, one in the factory and one in the sawmill," he recalls. "I had a metal bed with a curtain around it.... That was my room and my haven and my space." It was there—largely alone, save for his imagination—that he spun a fantasy world fueled by a love of American Westerns, which planted the seed for his future career.

Christian Anwander

When Brosnan was thirty-one, his father briefly resurfaced. "I only met Tom the once," he says. It was in 1984, when, at Brosnan's suggestion, Remington Steele, the detective procedural that made him famous, filmed an episode in Ireland. "I had a Sunday afternoon with him," he says. "A story about this and that, had a few pints of Guinness, and we said goodbye." Brosnan squints in the sunlight. "I would have loved to have known him. He was a good whistler and he had a good walk.... That's as much as I know about him."

Whereas his best-known characters—Remington Steele, Thomas Crown, James Bond—are rakish and aristocratic, Brosnan is wry and reticent in person. Such stoic reserve is born of a life sorely tested. He lost his first wife, Cassandra, to ovarian cancer in 1991 and their daughter, Charlotte, to the same disease in 2013. (He got remarried in 2001, to Keely Shaye Smith, a television personality turned environmental activist and documentarian.) A year ago, ovarian cancer also claimed the life of his producing partner, Beau Marie St. Clair. "I don't look at the cup as half full, believe me," Brosnan says. "The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time."

Yet he's been able to find equanimity as of late. Brosnan is a prolific painter, and he is learning to appreciate downtime. "My days are full in a leisurely sort of way," he says. "This morning I worked out, read The New York Times, enjoyed watching my wife in the editing room, then came to meet you." When he's not filming, he splits his time between what he considers his greatest indulgences: the two houses he and Smith own in Malibu and Hawaii. "You don't need a big home," he says. "You need a good table to sit at, a good bed to sleep in, a view, and a great bottle of wine."

This article appears in the April '17 issue of Esquire.

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