Pierce Brosnan is the star of a new TV show: AMC’s The Son. Pierce plays the father! The series is based on Philipp Meyer’s 2013 novel, and Pierce plays patriarch Eli McCullough, who wants to pass on the family business (oil) to his children. To promote the show, Pierce has obviously been giving interviews, and g–damn if he doesn’t come across as one of the nicest and most low-key dudes out there. For background: Pierce lost his first wife, Cassandra, to ovarian cancer in 1992. Then in 2013, he lost his daughter (he adopted Cassandra’s children) Charlotte to the same form of ovarian cancer. After being a widower for a decade, he married Keely Shaye Smith and they’ve been together ever since. Anyway, you can read Pierce’s new Esquire profile here. Some highlights:

His four sons: “I know what it’s like to bring up sons and it can be a very arduous road. My fatherly instincts are purely my own. They relate back to no one, because there was no one.”

His father abandoned Pierce & his mom, and his mom left town to find work, so he lived in a boarding house as a kid: “There were two lodgers—workingmen, one in the factory and one in the sawmill. I had a metal bed with a curtain around it…. That was my room and my haven and my space.”

He met his father one time: “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. 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.”

Losing his wife, daughter & producing partner to cancer: “I don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me. The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time.”

His downtime: 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.”

[From Esquire]

Winston Churchill called it that too, The Black Dog. It was a reference to melancholy moods, if not flat-out depression. Churchill tried to keep The Black Dog at bay by painting as well, like Pierce does. It sounds like Pierce also has carved out a space which makes him feel safe and brings him joy: a home in Hawaii and a wife he adores. Anyway, I love Pierce and I appreciate that he’s not pretending to be hashtag-blessed or whatever – this is a man who has endured profound losses in his life and yes, of course it has affected him and it still affects him. To lose three women (Cassandra, Charlotte and his producing partner) who were so important to him? Of course he deals with depression and melancholy. Of course he has a hard time being optimistic.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.