Texas. 1915. Gorgeous green land extends as far as the eye can see, nary a spot sullied by human hands. A small encampment has been set up in an open field near a patch of trees. A dozen or so cloth tents have been erected. Game meats are stretched out to dry. Around a long wooden table sit a handful of older gentlemen swilling whiskey and playing cards while sweating through nice-but-casual three-piece suits. Three or four Model-T cars are parked nearby. Horses softly neigh in the background.

One man in particular stands out: Eli McCullough, tall and commanding. With knee-high black riding boots, a cowboy hat, and a black jacket over a red-and-white shirt that’s being adjusted by a young lady, he is sweating profusely, just like everyone else in sight—only he’s holding a small, pink, battery-operated fan directly in front of his finely coiffed white beard.

“Fire in the hole!” a production assistant yells. In an instant the carefully constructed illusion of Eli McCullough’s world dissolves into the set of The Son, a new AMC television series shot in Central Texas during the summer and early fall last year. The show premieres April 8 (its pilot screened at South by Southwest last month). Several producers, script supervisors, sound guys, and the director huddle under a pop-up tent to ward off the 90-degree October heat. The makeup team frantically sprays sunscreen on bald heads, costumers tweak the angles of cowboy hats, and Zyrtec is passed around like it’s chewing gum.

Between takes star Pierce Brosnan, the bearded man in question, jokes around with his assistant, who totes his essentials (sunglasses, iPhone, gum) in her fanny pack. The sound of his charming Irish brogue pushes his larger-than-life TV counterpart further away. Yet soon enough the scene is reset, and the world of the McCulloughs springs back to life.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes!” Brosnan booms in a thick Texan accent as he slaps David Wilson Barnes, who plays his son Phineas, on the back. As they stroll through the camp, Eli takes a bow-and-arrow from a younger man and shoots quail out of the hands of a servant standing a dozen feet away. Father and son then continue on, chatting and walking. And cut.

The 30-second scene, which at press time was slated to appear in the eighth episode of the series, requires eight takes because the trick of shooting the quail involves a long string attached to fake birds being pulled by a crew member, and the timing must be just so to make it believable. Brosnan is a consummate professional through every repetitious shot.

Too soon my visit to 1915 South Texas is over. I’m back to reality—on a ranch near Dripping Springs, not far from Salt Lick BBQ. Brosnan is quick to shed his jacket in the heat, revealing just for a moment his completely sweat-soaked shirt. He hops into a Range Rover to head back to base camp down the road to enjoy some air conditioning before his next scene.

“The heat was fairly intense. That just kind of blew me away,” Brosnan laughs while we chat on the phone in early January as he’s preparing to jet off to Italy for a new role. “I knew it was going to be hot, but when you get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to go to work, and there’s a heat advisory saying, ‘Do not go out,’ and by 9 o’clock you’re sitting on your horse and it’s 104 degrees, that kind of fairly slaughters you.”

The Son was originally set to star Sam Neill, who pulled out just prior to shooting in June. Brosnan stepped into the shoes of Eli, who is also known as “the Colonel,” “Tiehti,” and the “first son of Texas.” The series is based on Austin author Philipp Meyer’s novel of the same name, which spans more than 200 years of the fictional McCullough family. “It’s an epic story about America, about oil, about Texas, and the making of an empire on the landscape of the Republic of Texas,” Brosnan says.

While it was a scramble to find a replacement for Neill (Brosnan tells me that the two are old friends, and he even reached out to ask Neill for his blessing on the project), everyone involved with the series agrees that the actor best known as elegant British superspy James Bond was the right man to play a rough-edged frontier patriarch.

"Pierce was really perfect for the character in every single way. I mean, he had been James Bond for so long that he handles a gun amazingly well. He rides amazingly well. Pierce looks like a guy who’s been doing this his whole life,” Meyer (pictured above) tells me at his Bouldin Creek home in late January while Willie Nelson plays in the background and his orange tabby Hemingway runs underfoot.

The author’s three-story industrial-style home is amply decorated with finds he made as he researched the book. On display are bows from a Comanche tribe in Oklahoma, animal hides he tanned himself, the head of a black bear he shot in the mountains of Virginia, historical Civil War rifles and Colt revolvers, and custom-made moccasins—along with thousands of books (including a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses), props from the AMC series, and, the pièce de résistance, a bright yellow-and-red painting of Fidel Castro emblazoned with the words “Cuba Libre,” crafted by Brosnan himself.

“He’s actually a really good artist. Most people don’t know that about him,” Meyer says, laughing.

The Son was published in 2013 and received copious praise from critics (including being named a Pulitzer Prize finalist) for its epic storytelling, multiple narrators, and vivid imagery. The 561-page opus follows the McCullough family from young Eli’s abduction and integration into a Comanche tribe in 1849 to his ascent as a legendary cult hero as a Texas Ranger and oilman (then called “the Colonel”) through his second son Peter’s cattle ranching days in 1915, and finally to great-granddaughter Jeanne in 2012—the Colonel still a looming, almost-mythological presence in her life, a reminder of her family’s violent past.

The book is a “sort of” thematic follow-up to Meyer’s debut, American Rust, which he wrote while attending the Michener Center at the University of Texas until 2008. While his first novel focuses on a financially distraught Pennsylvania steel town and the notion of the American dream—along with the desperation people have to achieve it—The Son is a grandiose work that deals with violence and greed through the rise of the great state of Texas.

“Eli is born on the same day as the Republic of Texas, so he’s the actual embodiment of the state, and it’s a book about Texas, but this is like a lens to see who we are as Americans. I wanted to write about a time in history in which the American dream was still kind of working. But, once you delve into the history, you realize, to a certain extent, the American dream was always at the expense of other people,” Meyer says.

In a seeming homage to Moby-Dick’s infamous whaling chapter, The Son describes in great detail the killing, skinning, and butchering of a buffalo, a process that Meyer spent five years researching—soaking up Comanche culture, learning about the history of Texas oil, Texas Rangers, and “Bandit Wars” (an “un-PC term,” according to Meyer), and even training with Navy SEALs to get into “the mindset of a warrior”—before the book was complete.

“I learned these skills so I felt like I could talk about them in an honest way,” Meyer explains. “In Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking,’ he talks about the impression of your feet after you pick apples, because the ladder rungs had just been digging into the bottom of your feet all day. And that’s just one of those details that, unless you’d done this, you wouldn’t know. A book like this has to have thousands of those details to be just right.”

Details like the fact that Native Americans ate much of the buffalo raw. Meyer wanted to know for himself exactly what that would taste like, so he visited several ranches where he helped to kill and butcher bison. “I drank a cup of this buffalo blood like right out of it … basically like a cup of coffee, just stuck it under the neck of this animal that we’d killed and hung upside down. It was disgusting,” Meyer says.

Although this particular fact didn’t make it into the book, it could possibly work its way into the AMC series at some point, given Meyer’s close relationship to the show. He casually mentions he turned down movie deals from the likes of Peter Berg and Steven Spielberg in order to develop, create, write, and produce the 10-episode season with two fellow Michener Center graduates, Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman.

“It is really such an incredible privilege when you do a show based on source material, and you have the opportunity to work with the guy who originated it. Philipp had put so much of his heart and life into this before I even showed up,” says showrunner Kevin Murphy, who previously worked on Desperate Housewives.

For all the crew members I spoke to, three truths were unanimous: 1) The heat was brutal on everyone, even crew who had previously worked on Austin-area productions, like Friday Night Lights; 2) Pierce Brosnan is the absolute best (“Everybody in the world loves Pierce Brosnan, and that includes animals because Pierce’s horse developed an incredible crush on him,” Murphy says); and 3) Meyer was essentially an on-set historian, which made the show that much better and more realistic.

“Philipp’s book was our bible,” says prop master Scott Reeder. “He’s so detailed. And it made my job so much easier with his wealth of information that he gives in the book.”

Much like when Elijah Wood moved to Bouldin Creek and reporting sightings of the onetime Frodo Baggins became a local pastime, Brosnan became something of a mythical presence around town during the five months of production on the series, some of which he documented through his Instagram account.

There he was eating ’cue in Lockhart and buying a cowboy hat at Texas Hatters (where Stevie Ray Vaughan had his hats made). He enjoyed golfing, hanging out on a balcony on “Dirty Sixth,” sipping bloody marys at Güero’s, and even grooving to Eliot Sumner’s set during the Austin City Limits Music Festival.“The warmth and the hospitality; the experience was first-rate,” he says of Austin. “I just absolutely adored the town. And once I got over the shock of the freeways there, which are just ginormous and kaleidoscopic and otherworldly, I loved the intimacy of the town. I had a great time there, and I really couldn’t have been happier.”

Brosnan took a piece of the capital city with him home, where he continues to wear his “George Strait cowboy hat” on the California beaches, although “somehow Malibu and the cowboy hat just don’t seem to kind of go hand in hand.”

While he seemingly ate all over ATX—there were multiple sightings at Odd Duck, and he loved Eddie V’s—the actor sheepishly admits he missed out on one of Austin’s most famous dishes. “I didn’t have one taco. I didn’t eat a single taco. Having lived in California for 30-odd years and then some, my meat consumption had diminished. I’m an Irishman and was brought up on great Irish stews, so I had some great brisket and some short ribs,” he says. Sensing my utter shock and disappointment, he quickly adds, “There’s always season two, Darcie! I’ll come looking for you, and you can take me for your best taco.”

During a birthday party for the Colonel in the first episode, the old man gets up in front of a crowd at his ranch home to give a speech. While the monologue goes on for a bit, Brosnan’s thunderous voice drives home the last part of the toast that fires up the spectators: “Here’s to family and home and the most bountiful place on God’s green earth. God bless Texas!”

As I watch this stately speech play out on my laptop in the air-conditioned comfort of my office, my mind wanders back to that sweltering October day and the greenery that surrounded the set. The beauty of Central Texas was on full display, a sight those of us who live here take for granted too often. The Son isn’t just a story about a man who fights his way to power, leaving everyone who crosses him in his dust—it’s also the story of our state, a story much too large to cram into 10 episodes.

Well, there’s always season two (if the show gets picked up). I’ll be waiting for that taco date, Pierce.

Read our full Q&A with Pierce Brosnan.