Brosnan on Bond - `I feel human again`

"I feel like an actor again," says Pierce Brosnan with a satisfied sigh. "I feel like a human being. I feel like an artist again." It's life after James Bond, the role he has left behind after four films and 10 years of association, that is making the actor formerly known as 007 feel so good - reports This Is London.

And he should be feeling even happier today after the news that his latest film, The Matador, has earned him a Golden Globe nomination. The joy in it for us is that it's a Best Comedy Performance nomination and probably the funniest thing that Brosnan has ever done.

With panache, he plays Julian Noble, a hard-drinking, sexually ambivalent, washed-up hitman who kills with no compunction. "I am very aware of the timing of this in my career," he admits, with a laugh.

Affecting a broad London accent, the moustachioed Brosnan is deliciously louche as he makes a pass at a married travelling salesman (Greg Kinnear) in a bar in Mexico City. The two get chatting and unexpectedly become friends, with each offering the other an exit from the trouble that has stricken their lives.

One minute Julian is traipsing across the hotel lobby in nothing more than a pair of briefs and some cowboy boots, the next taking a Filipino woman from behind on his travels for his next hit. He is vulgar and endearing - and everything that James Bond is not.

"You do sympathise with this man," Brosnan says. "I thought it was a wonderful role, which could dismantle what had gone before. I love that Julian was having a good time in his life but, as much as he tried to keep it all at bay - the loneliness and the sheer horror of his sick, moronic life - he was kind of lost. It allowed me to hit certain emblems that have happened in my career and just turn them on their head."

It's no secret that Brosnan had a prickly relationship with the producers of the Bond movies, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, who did not ask him to re-sign when his initial four-film expired.

Daniel Craig, of course, has now stepped into the Bond shoes, but Brosnan bears no grudge, he says, at least not against Craig.

"I wish Daniel all the greatest happiness and success with the role," he says with a weariness that suggests he knows he will be repeating the line for months to come. "I think he's a fantastic actor and he's given superb performances. I know the guy.

"We've gone out and we talked about it before the whole world knew about it. We had many beers over it and laughed and I wished him well. I just told him to have a good time with it, embrace it, enjoy it and travel through with his head high."

Brosnan seems almost wistful, however, as he talks about passing on the 007 baton. "I remember every moment of it. I remember sitting down with members of the world's press for the first time, and when I got back to my hotel room alone, lying there and thinking, 'God, what have I said yes to?' "When you play that particular role, it's a huge responsibility and you become something of an ambassador to a small country."

Since filming The Matador, he has grown a conical, grey beard, to add to his moustache, for his role in Seraphim Falls, currently shooting. He plays a captain in the Union Army, hunted across the country during the American Civil War by a colonel from the Confederate Army (played by fellow Irishman Liam Neeson).

He is clearly flexing his acting muscles and deliberately looking for character roles in a post-Bond career that other ex-Bonds such as Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton found hard to navigate. But then Brosnan stresses that he has been in the acting game for a long time. After all, he got his big break when Tennessee Williams cast him in the London production of Red Devil Battery Sign in 1976, which he followed with 18 months on stage in

Franco Zeffirelli's West End production of Filumena. By 1982, he was in Los Angeles beginning his five-year run as TV's conman-cum-private investigator Remington Steele.

Brosnan also means to keep his post-Bond career vibrant by developing film projects for himself through his company Irish Dreamtime. Matador director Richard Shepard was originally planning to make the film as a $20,000 mini-budget item on digital video before Brosnan saw the potential and turned it into something much bigger.

"Bond allowed me to create Irish Dreamtime and make films like The Matador or Evelyn or The Thomas Crown Affair, and to have choices that wouldn't necessarily be open to me because of the thinking in Hollywood that you have your own style of acting or performance. I'd like to think I have more than one performance in me ..."

Ironically, for all his departures from the suave persona that informed both James Bond and Remington Steele, Brosnan hopes to bring Remington back in a big-screen version of the series. "The show is out on DVD now and so we have started negotiations on making a movie out of it," he says. "I think there's an audience there. There's a sentimental memory and fondness for it."

Before that, the 53-year-old actor has another subversive role on the cards: he'll play a brutal kidnapper who rips a family apart in Butterfly on a Wheel, and do a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair.

It's beginning to look like saying goodbye to Bond will give Brosnan a new start. "Life was a lot different when I was 24," he agrees, "but the hunger is just as fresh now as it was then to get better as an actor."

The Matador opens in the UK on 24 February.

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