Things were about to get shakier. At the time, he says, his agents were negotiating for him to do a fifth Bond film when suddenly the producers “changed their minds. They rethought the role. They wanted to go younger. They wanted to put a whole new spin on it and reinvigorate the part. [My agents] said, ‘Negotiations have stopped.’ ” (Perhaps the $25 million plus 5 percent of the gross that he was reportedly asking for was a factor.)

“I’m about to do scene 58 with the lovely Salma Hayek where we roll around on the beach naked and talk about some silly diamond,” says Brosnan. “And the boys are telling me that the negotiations have stopped. When the message was delivered, it was a body blow. I said, ‘What does that mean?’ They said, ‘We don’t know. But they’ll call you next Friday. Five-thirty.’ ”

“It would have been sweet to go back for a fifth,” he continues. “I was just getting the hang of it, you know? They really loosened up the reins on the last one, with Lee Tamahori. It would have been wonderful to go out there for one last game and pass the baton.”

More silence. “Well, there you go,” he says finally, his blue eyes looking shiny and a bit wild. “Life is messy. It’s fucked up at times. Whether they made the right choice, who knows? They’re probably scared shitless, thinking, ‘What have we done? Did we jump the gun? For what reasons? For what truthful, honest reason?’ Only they will know.

“Enough about it,” he concludes, tearing into his fish. “Really. I want to come up with a great line here but I can’t. It fucking sucks. Completely.”

In the three decades that he’s worked as an actor, Brosnan, 52, has become a big believer in something he calls “cinematic alchemy,” or the right thing happening in his career at the right time for the right reason. Call it the luck of the Irish, he says, but perhaps a more reasonable explanation is his “just being aware of those moments when there’s a shift because it leads to opportunities, and hopefully, it leads to growth.”

He’s been clear-eyed about his choices since he was an Irish lad from a broken home who moved to England with his mother, fell in love with acting, and made a name for himself on the stage, starring in productions for Tennessee Williams and Franco Zeffirelli. In 1980, Brosnan married Australian actress Cassandra Harris (coincidentally, a Bond girl from For Your Eyes Only), who convinced him to give Hollywood a shot.

Almost immediately after moving to Los Angeles, he landed TV’s Remington Steele, the first of his portrayals of elegant detectives and spies, and launched an image that he now calls “a blessing and a curse.” In 1986, Brosnan was offered the role of Bond by the late Cubby Broccoli, but he had to turn it down when the show was unexpectedly picked up for a final season.

Remington Steele ran its course, and Brosnan transitioned into film with mixed results, lending his leading-man looks to genre pictures like Live Wire and The Lawnmower Man and trying his hand at comedy with a supporting role in Mrs. Doubtfire. He was also grieving for his wife Cassie, who at the end of 1991 lost her hard-fought battle with cancer, a time he describes as “the black nausea.” Struggling with finding fulfilling work, Brosnan was having some serious discussions with his financial manager when he learned that he had landed the role of Bond in 1995’s GoldenEye. “My life has been a dream in many respects,” he says, “with big gobs of reality thrown in.”

As much as Brosnan may lament the loss of Bond, a role he says he was “deeply proud” to play, and what it brought him—the money, the cars, the international adoration, the endorsement deals—it’s obvious that as an actor, he grew frustrated with the role, having criticized the plots, the pun-filled dialogue, the pomposity, and the franchise’s general frippery.

“The Matador just came at a perfect time, with Bond falling apart,” he says. “The perfect time to get all that shit out of my system, everything that had been going around in my head, and pour it into Julian.”

Screenwriter and up-and-coming director Shepard sent his script for The Matador to Brosnan’s production company, Irish DreamTime, not as a starring vehicle for the actor, but as a writing sample. At the time, he was trying to get hired to pen The Topkapi Affair, the sequel to 1999’s The Thomas Crown Affair. He didn’t write the script with Brosnan in mind, but, inspired by Sexy Beast, came up with the concept by thinking “what would happen to James Bond if he really looked into his soul,” Shepard says. “It’s [about] someone who had to turn off their emotions for twenty years in order to do a job.”

As fate would have it, the DreamTime execs loved the dialogue-heavy, tonally challenging script and passed it to Brosnan, who was searching for a new project to star in and produce. At first, the actor wasn’t sure he wanted to play yet another gun-toting, babe- bedding hit man, but the amoral yet endearing Julian resonated with him because of “the drifting of his soul,” he says. “He was rudderless in life. He has low self-esteem, this fellow. At the same time, he’s confident. He has this bravado about him.”

“It takes the Bond character that we’ve come to know Pierce as and throws it on its ear,” says producer Bryan Furst. “It does have international intrigue and all that, but it’s really about someone who is in crisis, at a turning point, and trying to figure out how he’s going to maintain. What was once a glamorous existence is starting to wear on him.”

Although the parallels to his personal life and career are hard to miss, Brosnan says that he never planned to make The Matador his epilogue for a decade playing James Bond. To get into the head of Julian, a character that he feels has more in common with another one of his oversexed spies—Andy Osnard from 2001’s The Tailor of Panama—he called a “high-ranking friend” at the LAPD, who hooked him up with a criminologist.