The 35-year-old says his life turned around when he got married and had a child.
There are many sons and daughters of the rich and famous who have suffered from addiction, and Sean Brosnan, son of Pierce Brosnan, is one of them. Now he’s sober and looking back on the long hard road he traveled to get there.
As People reports, Sean went through a devastating loss when his mother died at the age of eight. “I remember the day my dad told me she passed, and it was a few days after Christmas,” he explained. “He started to cry, but I didn’t cry. I was comforting him at eight. It wasn’t until maybe six months later where I was in school and realized while I was walking to class, she is never coming back. That is when it transitioned into anger.”
Sean first started taking drugs in middle school, and when he got into a major car crash at the age of 16, he got hooked on painkillers. Sean’s friend was driving drunk.
“He had a couple of beers and was over the limit,” he said. “I broke my back and shattered my tailbone, my pelvis in five places, my left femur. I took opioids for the first time in the hospital.”
Sean recalled after the accident that he became “a drug connoisseur” but his drug of choice was alcohol. He tried to get sober when he was about 25, and survived several suicide attempts. “I wanted help and I was once again in no man’s land.”
Sean was later dealt another terrible blow, losing his half-sister Charlotte to ovarian cancer, which also killed his mother. “After she died, I drank on the plane on the way there. The insidious part of the disease was that I almost used it as an excuse. Which sounds terrible to say but that is my addict in me saying, ‘Yes, I can drink, and no one can blame me.'”
Sean says his life turned around when he got married in 2014 and had a child in 2015. He’s since left Hollywood behind and works in the healthcare field, which he finds much more fulfilling.
Sean is currently a residence advisor at a treatment center, and is working towards becoming a psychologist. “In the last two years, I sort of started not finding as much meaning in what I was doing in the film industry,” he explains. “The only thing I knew besides the film industry was addiction.”
