Pierce Brosnan `unbound from Bond`

Pierce Brosnan's comically garish hit man in The Matador has little in common with the debonair James Bond, but they share at least one philosophy about their work: Always plan an escape route - reports USA Today.

That's what the Irish actor decided to do more than 10 years ago when he started playing the iconic British agent in 1995's GoldenEye. He knew that all James Bond careers come to an end, as his did this year when 007 producers replaced him with blond, blue-eyed, 37-year-old Daniel Craig (Munich).

"As soon as I said yes, I was looking for a way out," Brosnan, 52, says, looking tired after flying in to Los Angeles from a long night shoot of the Western Seraphim Falls in New Mexico. "As much as I wanted to be a success (as Bond), I'd seen men go before me."

Those men, he knew, each faced a case of pop-culture shock when they relinquished the role, finding that fans did not necessarily follow them to other projects.

Sean Connery, the first James Bond, took more than a decade to escape the shadow of the character after his run ended, and the leading-man days for Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton essentially ended along with their tenures in the series. George Lazenby, who played Bond only once, in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, never achieved that level of stardom again.

Brosnan must now capitalize on the momentum from his 007 fame while proving he is not totally defined by a tux, a martini and a catchphrase. "You know you're going to be pigeonholed, and possibly painting yourself into a corner — which is fine. I can carry on doing that," he says. "But there's more to it." And more to Brosnan.

The script for The Matador— opening Friday in New York and Los Angeles — landed on his desk at his production company, Irish DreamTime, which he co-founded with producer Beau St. Clair. It was a writing sample submitted by Richard Shepard, who was trying to get work on a sequel to the company's Thomas Crown Affair.

"After GoldenEye, I created Irish DreamTime with the intention of making films and finding material that wouldn't necessarily come my way," Brosnan says.

"I knew we had to have a post-Bond plan," says St. Clair. "I think, 'What if we didn't have a company, and what if we didn't fill the in-between time with movies, where would you be after you put everything into the franchise?' The next step, over the next 10 years, is to show other sides of who Pierce is."

The Matador, his first post-Bond film, already has earned Brosnan a Golden Globe nomination for comedic lead actor, his first since a TV-movie supporting-actor nod in 1985 for the BBC miniseries Nancy Astor.

Since the film made its debut at last January's Sundance Film Festival, Brosnan has raised eyebrows with his lively performance as Julian Noble, a lonesome mercenary who befriends a struggling businessman (Greg Kinnear) in Mexico City and draws the salt-of-the-earth type into his world of sleaze and slayings.

Noble is a profane dynamo, a hired killer with a petty, childish streak, someone who tells a filthy joke to change the subject when his salesman friend begins talking about his young son's death.

"He's locked in as a kind of 15-year-old, or maybe a 13-year-old, but he's lethal mixed on top of it," Brosnan says.

The character also has an anemic mustache, is unlucky with women (unless he pays for their company) and is prone to strolling through a ritzy hotel lobby wearing cowboy boots and a Speedo. He also kills people, preferably when they're using the toilet, since that's a vulnerable moment for anybody.

"I didn't think any sane actor would want to play this part," says writer/director Shepard, who until then had made a handful of little-seen movies. "Usually the director goes looking for an actor, but in this case, it was the actor who came looking for me."

For Brosnan, it was a kind of tonic from playing the smooth, international man of sophistication in his four James Bond movies and other films such as Thomas Crown and his breakthrough title role in the 1980s TV series Remington Steele.

"When you play the same performance, play variations on a theme, and you know that it's getting really boring, and you're getting bored with yourself and you've done it to the best of your ability, you have to find new material," Brosnan says. "It's not always easy to do."

Brosnan says he knew the audaciousness of Noble would surprise people used to seeing him as Bond. "The audience thinks, 'Well, Brosnan's there, and that's a crazy mustache. He's kind of letting it all hang out there.' So I knew the shock value of it," he says.

Says St. Clair, "Now he can take some really big risks. There was a certain responsibility to the franchise. Nobody really wants the actor playing the role to be too extreme. Probably The Matador wouldn't have sat well" with Bond producers.

Shepard agrees that Brosnan's built-in reputation creates contrast for The Matador, which is titled after a sequence in which Noble speaks wistfully about a bullfighter's efficient killing skills.

"The baggage that Pierce brings from his career helps the part by making it a more interesting and deeper movie," Shepard says. "Pierce always plays somebody totally put-together, somebody in control. But Julian Noble is so obviously not in control. He's actually a pathetic mess, a guy who's having a nervous breakdown and doesn't have a friend in the world."

The character struck such a nerve in Brosnan that, during filming, the amateur painter began work on a self-portrait — not as himself, but as Julian. The colorful image, complete with his narrow villain's mustache and a car bomb exploding in the background, hangs in Brosnan's Santa Monica office. "There's so much ownership over this project, a great satisfaction in building it from the ground up," Brosnan says.

As Shepard puts it: "Pierce is used to these movies where 50 executives have to agree to something because they are talking about a billion-dollar franchise. I think he dug this and had a really good time."

Despite the praise Brosnan has received for The Matador, he still desperately needs it to be a hit, proof that he can open a movie that doesn't include 007. He remained busy with other projects throughout his run as the spy, and although most of them did modestly well, very few were blockbusters.

What they did succeed in doing was showcasing Brosnan's range to audiences, and in some cases, poking holes in his image as Bond.

"I'm definitely aware of the image I've created," Brosnan says. "You establish yourself as the world's greatest spy and then you go and play the underbelly of that" in a movie such as 2001's The Tailor of Panama, in which he co-starred as a more realistic spy, this one with compromised morals, who feeds bad information back to the British government.

That film, released mainly in art houses, earned only $13.8 million (compared with the Bond films that bookended it, The World Is Not Enough with $127 million and Die Another Day with $161 million). He used his clout with then-Bond studio MGM to get its United Artists division to finance the Irish family drama Evelyn, in which he starred as a down-on-his-luck dad trying to reclaim his children from the state, but the film earned a paltry $1.5 million.

His post-GoldenEye volcano thriller Dante's Peak earned a respectable $67 million in 1997, about the same as his self-produced Thomas Crown Affair in 1999 — enough to have Sony Pictures interested in a sequel. But recently, his self-produced romantic comedy Laws of Attraction, with Julianne Moore, and his crime thriller After the Sunset both underperformed.

"Brosnan has a solid, good career as an actor without Bond. But I personally believe that had he not been cast as Bond, those roles would have unfortunately not come to him," says John Cork, co-author of James Bond: The Legacy and Bond Girls Are Forever: The Women of James Bond.

With his beard and long hair for Seraphim Falls, Brosnan lately is looking very un-Bond-like.

Part of his plan is to embrace variety: His next roles will be as a kidnapper who tries to ransom a child in the thriller Butterfly on a Wheel, and then he changes gears again for the period drama based on the children's book The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.

And he's as eager as the next person to see what becomes of his old alter ego when Craig takes over as Bond in 2006's Casino Royale.

"Daniel and I know each other and I wish him all the greatest success and happiness with it," Brosnan says. "He's a wonderful actor. I think he'll fly high and far and wide with it."

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