The Bi Who Loved Me

The Matador
Directed by Richard Shepard
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis, Phillip Baker Hall

There is a decidedly odd moment early in The Matador when the film’s smarmy lead character muses that there are two things that always taste better in Mexico: “Margaritas … and cock!”

As jarring as the words themselves is the fact that they are spoken by Pierce Brosnan, the perennially suave actor who gained international film-star status mouthing the PG-rated double entendres — as opposed to genitally specific single ones — of James Bond. Triply weird is that, despite boasting the ratty moustache and zip-up boots of a cheap pimp, Brosnan’s booze-guzzling, sexually voracious, continent-hopping assassin Julian Noble is a very 007-ish figure. Certainly, the technical lack of a license to kill doesn’t stop him from doing a great deal of it in this genre-tweaking comedy-drama.

“It definitely is like the very worst day of James Bond’s life,” explains The Matador’s writer-director, Richard Shepard. “I was really lucky that Pierce said, ‘All right, I’m gonna allow you to possibly destroy my career.’”

The hitman — or, as the ironically named Noble prefers, “fatality facilitator” — is at the end of his guilt-racked tether, seemingly incapable of a real relationship until he finds himself bonding (sorry) with Greg Kinnear’s average-joe businessman over hotel bar drinks. It is that tenuous connection around which the film hinges, as Brosnan first attempts to get his new friend to help him on a job and then, months later, turns up at the suburban Denver home Kinnear shares with wife Hope Davis for reasons unknown and, given the film’s house-of-mirrors plotting, unguessable.

It’s easy to see why the role appealed to Brosnan, who, prior to being relieved of 007’s tux last year, had long agitated for the franchise to loosen its profitable but formulaic creative straitjacket. Given this — as well as the actor’s own description of The Matador as “a farewell to that chapter in time” — it is easy to view the film, which his own company produced, as an attempt to show what could have been in the Bond universe.

And what could have been proves to be a lot of fun. We first encounter Brosnan waking in a Mexico City hotel room next to a naked beautiful woman — so far, so Bond. Rather less superspy-ish is the fact that Brosnan next decorates his toes with the lime-green nail varnish of said beauty, just one of many ladies of the night he will engage during the course of the film. Although it’s not just ladies of the night that Brosnan’s Noble is carnally interested in.

“Pierce is definitely playing a trisexual,” chuckles Shepard. “The character will try anything because he’s lapsed into this moral vacuum.”

At the time the 40-year-old Shepard wrote The Matador, he was recovering from a long spell in “movie jail,” penance for having directed 1992’s David Bowie–starring The Linguini Incident, a box-office bomb he now describes as “a disaster on every level.” Shepard originally intended The Matador to be made for $250,000 with unknown New York stage actors before Brosnan expressed an interest in playing the lead.

“I truly thought that no mainstream actor would say ‘margaritas and cock,’” says Shepard, who with Brosnan on board was able to secure a $10 million budget. “And I didn’t even think about Pierce at all, although in the original script there was a line where Greg Kinnear’s character says to him, ‘What are you? James Bond?’”

The end product, far from destroying Brosnan’s reputation, may well be the making of his post-Bond career as the actor rearranges his signature role’s DNA without ever falling into parody. Moreover, regardless of who replaces him as 007, it’s difficult to imagine the next Bond movie being as stylish or well-written as this.

“I’m happy that this movie works on its own terms, but it’s working on another level as well,” admits Shepard. “Pierce is truly saying goodbye to a character in a very funny way. I mean, there’s one scene where he’s fucking this woman and a dog is humping his leg! But he never said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ It was more like, ‘What’s the line between funny and debased?’”