Pierce Brosnan admits 007 will follow him around for life

Most actors can move effortlessly from role to role. Unless you have played a certain secret agent named James Bond. “Wherever I go in this world, and I’ve been around it now quite a few times, the character of Bond is always there,” says Pierce Brosnan, who portrayed 007 on screen from 1995’s Golden Eye to 2002’s Die Another Day. “I’m very fortunate to have had him in my life. It’s allowed me to travel the world, it’s allowed me to walk with kings and travel in high society and travel through many other cultures in labyrinthine parts of the world, you know?”

But that doesn’t mean he wants to be trapped in a debonair stereotype forever. Even before Daniel Craig took over the Bond role recently, Brosnan was looking for ways to stretch. In his new comedy The Matador, he plays coarse, grubby assassin Julian Noble - reports the Financial Times (NY).

Still, the Bond baggage automatically comes along. “Of course, this is a departure, but it’s also kind of playing on the theme as well,” he says with a hint of his native Irish accent. “This man doesn’t have a licence to kill. There is just a mild semblance of Bond in there, but it has nothing to do with Bond.”

Writer-director Richard Shepard knew Brosnan was looking to do something he hadn’t done before. “Certainly, playing a vulgarian like Julian was something he had not done before.

And we never talked about James Bond or any of that. I was trying to subvert the image of Pierce, whether or not he was in James Bond. But he is always, even in The Thomas Crown Affair, he’s always dressed perfectly, there’s not a hair out of place. All that baggage that he brings to the movie helps it.

In fact Brosnan stumbled into the film almost by accident. “I went into the office one morning and I heard one of my colleagues talking about The Matador,” recalls Brosnan, who says he was immediately intrigued. “The Matador is a very provocative title. I love the world of the hit man. It’s so grotesque, so chillingly awful that we are fascinated,” Brosnan says. “This one was definitely not in the world of the great reality of the here and now. The appeal was the kind of sad, twisted, mangled lives set against the landscape of Mexico City. ”

If Brosnan is hardly the always-in-control superhero this time, that is fine with him. “Image is something you need to keep denying, if the role is good enough. I’ve had a certain image since Remington (Steele),” the 1980s martini-cool detective series, “a seminal piece in my life.”

At age 52, however, Brosnan prefers breaking out of that box. “It’s great fun, and that’s what you look for in a career. Thus the juxtaposition of Thomas Crown, the juxtaposition of Evelyn (in which he played a down-on-his-luck Irish father) and also now this movie. It’s all a part of a continuum.”

Not that he is a method actor who plumbed the depths of burnout to become Julian. “No, I don’t want to go that deep. Why identify with a psychopath?” asks Brosnan rhetorically. “But you can find a psychologist in the L.A.P.D., like I did, and she analysed it and we sat down and she broke it down and she was very insightful about the world of psychopaths. Then the rest is from your own imagination, your own sense of intuition.”

Still, The Matador is a comedy. Shepard aimed to draw audiences into the conventions of a hit man movie, then play with their expectations. Unexpectedly, Brosnan not only said he wanted to star in The Matador, but he also wanted to produce it. Overnight its budget ballooned to $10 million. The Matador was completed in time for last year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it screened without advance word. “Sundance was a memorable, unforgettable event. First of all, because I’d never been there before,” explains Brosnan. “The opening night was jubilant. The rafters shook. People had no idea what to expect. And they laughed in all the right places.”

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