Okay, so let me tell you what happens when your phone rings and the voice on the other end of the line belongs to Pierce Brosnan: You're done. That's it. He's yours. I never want to hear any other voice on the phone ever again. If the phone rings again and it's my mom on the other end of the line, I will be secretly crushed that it's not Pierce Brosnan (sorry, mom). The voice is unmistakable: an Irish lilt softened over decades of living here in America, resulting in an accent that is entirely Brosnan's own. Trying to replicate it would be like trying to make a Serrano ham in Jacksonville. It can't be done. One "hello" is all he requires to reduce you to a swooning grandmother. Even the man's scandals are debonair.

We switch to Facetime and now I can see Brosnan in full, clad in a black jacket and amber sunglasses, a polka dot scarf coiled neatly around his neck. Brosnan is calling from his rental apartment in Austin, where he's shooting the second season of AMC's drama The Son, based on the acclaimed Philipp Meyer novel of the same name. Brosnan plays Texas patriarch Eli McCullough, and while the accent isn't terribly comfortable on him (do you want Pierce Brosnan to sound like anyone other than Pierce Brosnan?), the clothing is. For the part, he also grew out his beard to eminently twirlable length. A "mighty" beard, to use his word for it. He's losing the beard tomorrow, but for now he'll get in a few last pensive strokes.

As we talk, he moves with the phone around the apartment, which is festooned with his own linocuts and paintings. Big paintings. Brosnan got his start as a commercial artist, only to have acting get in the way and reduce his first vocation to an expansive hobby. Still, he paints. There's a huge octatych of a woman's face, painted in eight different stages until the final panel is just a depiction of her bare skull. There's a huge panel painting of what appears to be a big shiny geode. Brosnan doesn't want his painting to be typecast, and so his art is all over the place. He is all over the place, walking from room to room with a boundless energy that completely explains his lasting success. He shows me the living room. He shows me the kitchen. He takes me, virtually, out onto the balcony to get a bit of sun. He is a very clean talker, nary a contraction in sight. And he's not afraid to let moments pass as he chooses his words (he is talking to a reporter, after all), leaving comfortable valleys of silence in between his musical brogue. Read carefully enough down below and you'll hear that voice, familiar to you as it's ever been.

Jacket and sweater by Armani / Jeans by Ralph Lauren / All clothes his own.

GQ: So you had a long day yesterday.

Pierce: We shot until, oh my God, I think it was about 12:00 midnight. I started at 6:00 in the morning. But these things go like that. They just beat you up.

So why do it then?

Because this is what I do. This is my job. This is how I make my living. Nothing comes from nothing, and you have to do it.

How's the beard treating you?

The beard is coming off on Monday, thank God, yes. Eli is in the beard, and the beard is in Eli. There's a plan ahead here. I'm really thinking when they come 'round to Harry Potter number eight, I shall be Dumbledore. You know, my Dumbledore look.