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Features
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Licensed to Experiment
Pierce Brosnan may no longer be Bond, and he may have lost out on The Da Vinci Code. But there’s always The Matador and the fun of finding a new Remington Steele.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
By Kevin Biggers
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Having a grand old time
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Of the last four installments of the James Bond franchise, it’s Die Another Day that would appear to be the proper moniker for Pierce Brosnan’s career
these days.
While what happened in Bond contract negotiations stayed in Bond contract negotiations, one thing is for sure: Brosnan will no longer play the suave super agent. After the announcements, headlines ran like eulogies for Brosnan’s career. Were we in for a run of After the Sunset roles, where Brosnan would suit up in a faux Bond outfit and pretend like the past decade never existed?
In his first official post-Bond film, not to mention his first film in over a year, the revenant Brosnan briskly stamps off any remainders of his debonair persona and infuses his role in The Matador with a unique air of vulnerability and versatility that we’re not used to seeing in him display, proving there’s an intriguing personality and talented (though we always knew) career just getting underway.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Writer-director Shepard
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As Julian Noble, a burned out assassin, Brosnan relies on his surprisingly fierce comedic instincts and passionate self-deprecation while jabbing back and forth with co-stars Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis. During a recent interview with FilmStew, Brosnan, sporting a full Robinson Crusoe beard and a Mr. Miyagi goatee for his next role as a Civil War soldier, recalls the pleasure he took in playing Noble as a ‘lovable scumbag.’
“Easy as pie,” he chortles with breezy inflection. “It’s always been there. There are a few others in the back pocket.”
In one of The Matador’s more memorable scenes, Noble, in the midst of a lonely mid-life crisis, struts through a hotel lobby in nothing but his skivvies and a pair of cowboy boots. “I had a bathrobe on and as I was getting ready, I had the ol’ knickers
on and I thought, ‘Well I’ll keep the boots on as well because they’re just so funny,’” Brosnan explains. “[Someone] said that I could keep the dressing gown on or maybe even pajama bottoms but I said no, no, no, no!”
“The train left the station, this is too good. A great piece of shtick.”
In another scene, Noble and Greg Kinnear’s characters sit glumly on the edge of a bed in their Mexican hotel room as the screen inscrutably fades to black, hinting at the faintest possibility of a homosexual encounter. Director Richard Shepard reaches back to the glory days of Davie Bowie in describing Noble as a ‘try-sexual,’ because the character will indeed try anything.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Always up for some deadpan
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“I asked at the Toronto International Film Festival, at Sundance and every film festival,” he says. “I asked how many people thought that possibly the secret is that they [Brosnan and Kinnear’s characters] had something going on.”
“I would say 15 to 20 percent said they thought they did,” Shepard continues. “And in New York, it was 40 to 50 percent.” Sure enough, Kinnear upon walking into the interview session exclaims, “I heard we’re the new Brokeback Mountain!!”
While these and other misnomers surrounding the Brosnan good name create a fascinating beyond-Bond path, the 52-year-old actor rejects the idea of spending the rest of his career play the anti-Bond. Instead, he insists he was simply trying to honor the piece as written by Shepard.
Still, Brosnan conceded there is a certain ineluctability with regards to the image he’s created for via Bond, The Thomas Crown Affair, the TV series Remington Steele and next year’s The Topkapi Affair. “You’re always aware of how you’re perceived and the image you’ve painted yourself into a corner with,” Brosnan concedes while sharply emphasizing the word ‘corner.’ “I was looking and wondering when and how and in what shape and form a character would come along that would shump the career into another direction or break the mold.”
“It was there. You had to have patience.”
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NBC
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Moonlighting, Hart to Hart, et al
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Indeed, The Matador wasn’t immediately on Brosnan’s post-007 radar. As he completed After the Sunset in the Bahamas, Brosnan observed nearly every person sitting on the beach reading The Da Vinci Code. Several friends approached him saying he should play the Robert Langdon, the smooth haired, intellectual professor from Dan Brown’s super novel.
“So I read it and said, ‘I should play this role,” the actor heartily recalls. “I didn’t get it. So there you go. Some Tom guy, some Mr. Tom got it…I think he’s done a few hings.”
To the great delight of early Brosnan career fans, the actor recently revealed a secret project in the works at his production company, Irish DreamTime: Remington Steele, the movie. Though the script has yet to be completed, Brosnan definitely appears to have it on the brain, referring to the project two or three times during a 30-minute interview. However, much to the chagrin of virtually everyone, Brosnan is searching for someone younger to play Remington.
“I’m too old to play him right now,” Brosnan gruffly admits. “I’d get myself some wonderful cameo role, and try to steal the third act.”
Irish DreamTime had a lot to do with The Matador getting made. Shepard submitted his script to the company as a writing sample in hopes of becoming attached to the aforementioned Topkapi Affair. In his own mind, Shepard foresaw a low-end indie budget of $200,000 for The Matador, rather than the $10 million that finally came about.
“He [Pierce] was the first actor to get the script,” Shepard recalls. “He read it and said, “Hey I really like it, this is totally odd, let’s do it, I’ll produce it.”
Brosnan suggests he was lured him to the project by several different aspects. “I thought it was very play-like and I liked how it was a tight ensemble of three people,” the actor said. “I love the twists and turns and the flamboyance and the sheer vulgarian ways of Julian Noble’s mouth. I thought it had good character and I thought it had good heart. Most hit man movies leave off where we start. It just made me laugh.”
Because The Matador was independently financed, there was no money to shut any locations down for filming, including the hotel where a large chunk of the narrative was staged. As a result, people who were lucky enough to be staying there got to hang with the actor, even when he only had a pair of skivvies and cowboy boots on.
“All these men and women would see me every day and say, ‘Buenos Dias, Buenos Noche, Mr. Brosnan, Mr. Bond.” Brosnan muses. “Never can escape him.”
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