Look, he says, it was a good run. Ten solid years. He’s grateful for that. Losing the role was never the issue, really. No one gets to be James Bond forever. He knows that (how could he not?). Actors have been hired and retired by the Broccoli family before. They own the franchise. So what if they moved the goalposts on him? Fair play to them. Time passes. Tastes change. He’s fine with that. It’s all part of the gig.

What he does seem to find galling is how they handed him his walking papers. You’d think they would treat him with a little more respect. He was, after all, the one who breathed life back into the franchise when it was flatlining. His four Bond movies made billions. Die Another Day even set a franchise record, earning $425 million worldwide. You’d think that would have made a difference in how they showed him the door. It didn’t. And he can’t help but take that personally.

He gazes contemplatively at the emerald green ocean and takes a pull off an afternoon beer. His handsome features, which had collapsed into a heap of wrinkles and frowns, return to their usual composition of perfect masculine symmetry. He laughs with a weary resignation, and his resentment mellows into reluctant acceptance. “It was messy getting into this game,” he says. “It stays in fashion that it was messy getting out.”

Pierce Brosnan hasn’t come to Geoffrey’s, an upscale seaside restaurant near his home in Malibu, to, as he puts it, “twitter on” about his tenure in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which, as he’s mentioned before but hasn’t really discussed in detail, ended unceremoniously while he was shooting 2004’s After the Sunset in the Bahamas. He’s here to chat about another international assassin, one Julian Noble, his character in this month’s The Matador—a scrofulous, mustachioed, psycho-pathetic hit man who coincidentally (or maybe not) finds himself at a career crossroads, desperately wanting to quit his job as a “facilitator of fatalities.”

A compelling commingling of genres—a buddy picture that also plays as a psychodrama and a black comedy—The Matador, from writer-director Richard Shepard, made a splash at Sundance in January and was bought by Miramax. Since then, the indie film has been building considerable buzz, largely because of Brosnan’s gutsy, self-satirizing performance opposite Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis, in which he (literally) lets it all hang out. “This [role] was really a gem,” he says, “having been out in a landscape that is not too thoughtful, not quirky, not art—the big, commercial, hopefully entertaining world of Bond.”

Lunching on beet salad, sea bass, and vegetables, the actor—looking very un-Bond in a T-shirt and distressed chinos, with a tanned face full of gray stubble—has plenty to say about his upcoming film and seems optimistic and ambitious about his future prospects. But he’s clearly still struggling with saying goodbye to 007, the role that paid him a reported $15 million per picture and that he credits with making his career.

The way Brosnan tells it, his license to kill couldn’t have been revoked at a more inopportune time. He was in the middle of After the Sunset, a film that was having “a hard time finding [its] tone,” he says. Director John Stockwell (Into the Blue) had been replaced by Brett Ratner, whom Brosnan had at one time approached to direct a Bond film.

According to Brosnan, Ratner “brought the tone, and he brought it hard and fast. He picked up and carried Sunset, which was really a small film, and made this popcorn piece. It was kind of wobbly for a while. God, there were times I was cursing him out, cursing the writers out. I don’t like it when it gets shaky like that.”