[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some for the Season 1 finale of “MobLand.”]

Having just completed five movies and Guy Ritchie’s Shakespearean gangster series “MobLand,” Pierce Brosnan is kicking up his heels in Kauai. It’s the day after the airing of the Paramount+’s series bloody first season finale. He’s tired, but happy to declaim on a show that he and his wife Keely Shaye Smith enjoyed watching every week as it unfurled, commercials and all. “It is a toxic mess of pure mayhem and great shenanigans,” said Brosnan on Zoom.

Brosnan was the first in, after Ritchie sent him five scripts by showrunner Ronan Bennett. At first, Brosnan figured he was going for a North or South London accent: that’s where Conrad Harrigan bases his crime family. But Ritchie had other plans, said Brosnan: “In his shoot-from-the-hip style, with great bravado, he said, ‘Go Irish. Don’t worry about it. We’ll sort it out on the day. Put it out of your mind.'”

Of course, Brosnan did work on the text; then revisions arrived from the pen of Jez Butterworth (“Edge of Tomorrow”). “The writing became even more lyrical and nuanced,” said Brosnan. “I was working with Helen [Mirren] last summer on ‘Thursday Murder Club.’ She came up to me one day said, ‘OK, I’m in. If you’re doing it, I’m doing it.’ And we set sail. Right before shooting, she showed me photographs of herself, how she wanted to play the character, Lady Macbeth, that emblem is there. You take a Jacobean tragedy, any of those desperate pieces of writing. And then she called me up, and she said, ‘I hear you’re doing an Irish accent.’ She was doing Irish on ‘1923.’ Helen is very, very nimble on her feet, and she jumped in. We both flew together.”

We’ve seen Brosnan carry many movies with iconic characters over the years, from James Bond to Thomas Crown, but the older, wiser actor is unfettered and unleashed as he plays a powerful London kingpin who is used to getting his way. He’s truly dangerous, capable of doing anything, a Mad King George.

Brosnan wound up deploying a Kerry accent inspired by the father he never knew. “Guy just said, ‘Go mad. Got it?’ That was it,” he said. “And we took off from there, and everyone jumped in. It was the most incredible ensemble. Everyone knew what they wanted to do. Everyone was given free rein to just play, and we all knew each other’s style. Helen and I had worked together. Tom is one of those great charismatic presences on screen. We never discussed the parts. And I thought, ‘Fuck it. If you’re going to start working like this, then I’m free. I’m free. I can do anything I wish to do, whatever comes out of my mouth.'”

There’s no question the heightened intensity created a charged atmosphere on set. For Brosnan and Mirren, “both of us, there is a theatricality,” said Brosnan. “There is an operatic tone to the performances. They are grandiose, they are flamboyant. They are mangled, bottled spiders of venom with humor and cutting, biting Irish lyricism. And the writing, I was supported by the great words of Jez Butterworth, who captures the Irish heartbeat of discontent and caustic hearts.”

As the cast and crew knocked off the episodes, Butterworth was running behind, supplying new scripts for the final episodes at the last minute. “It was like a carpet that unfurled before me each and every week,” said Brosnan. “There were surprises. And you put your heart, your soul, your passion, your drive, the sheer alchemy of these great actors that you were surrounded by. And it was extremely liberating. Suddenly people were dying, and suddenly I’m losing my son. He’s getting his head lopped off. Hence, you’re in a nest of vipers.”

One of the vipers is Mirren’s Maeve, Conrad’s wife. “She is beyond words,” said Brosnan. “She’s Lady Macbeth, Phaedra. She’s poisoned. She is the ultimate bottled spider. Conrad knows, and he loves her. They love each other. They’re joined as these rogue genes from an early age, who challenge each other, love each other, and drive each other on. But there is a deep fracture of psychological damage to all of these characters. They’re all not well. They’re from abused backgrounds. They all come from a gene pool of bad blood and that’s the joy of it. And, Conrad is a pig farmer. He was a car thief. He’s done time. He’s hurt people. He’s a monster, but he has humanity to him as well.”

At the end of the series, Conrad is in Reading Gaol, behind glass with a phone as he meets his son Kevin (Paddy Considine). Conrad unravels as Kevin, who has stayed loyal to him his whole life, finally abandons him and calls him out. “It was a poignant scene,” said Brosnan. “As the series went on, we were playing catch-up all the time, so by the time we got to Episode 8, we really didn’t know what was going on, the scripts were coming in last minute. And then you have the poignant, brilliant, soul-searching, Paddy Considine. And when you work with people like that, they make you real, they give you so much. It was the last day, and we were doing this father-son scene in Reading jail where dear Oscar Wilde met his brutal, brutish end, really. That prison holds such tremor of desperation and dank tomb-like death.”

Producer David Glasser has teased a Season 2, which has yet to be officially announced. The end of the series sets up nasty conflicts between the surviving players, Conrad included, who goes out on a prison riot. Brosnan suggested playing the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

“Give the guy some juice,” he said. “Because they’re all applauding, you know? And they did, and then we cranked up ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ in Reading jail, and it just went through the roof.”

In the remake of the Sylvester Stallone chestnut “Cliffhanger,” “It’s Lily James and myself up the mountain, and the bad guys come,” Brosnan said. “I’m the dad, and she’s the heroine.” He plays a trainer in docudrama “Giant,” about Prince Naseem “Naz” Hamed, a British-Yemeni boxer who became world champion. And he goes West as a Sheriff battling villain Samuel L. Jackson in “Unholy Trinity.”

“There’s been work,” he said. “There’s been an abundance of work.”

“MobLand” is now streaming on Paramount+.