Pierce: I feel human again

Brosnan seems almost wistful, however, as he talks about passing on the 007 baton. "I remember every moment of it. I remember sitting down with members of the world's press for the first time, and when I got back to my hotel room alone, lying there and thinking, 'God, what have I said yes to?' "When you play that particular role, it's a huge responsibility and you become something of an ambassador to a small country."

Since filming The Matador, he has grown a conical, grey beard, to add to his moustache, for his role in Seraphim Falls, currently shooting. He plays a captain in the Union Army, hunted across the country during the American Civil War by a colonel from the Confederate Army (played by fellow Irishman Liam Neeson).

He is clearly flexing his acting muscles and deliberately looking for character roles in a post-Bond career that other ex-Bonds such as Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton found hard to navigate. But then Brosnan stresses that he has been in the acting game for a long time. After all, he got his big break when Tennessee Williams cast him in the London production of Red Devil Battery Sign in 1976, which he followed with 18 months on stage in

Franco Zeffirelli's West End production of Filumena. By 1982, he was in Los Angeles beginning his five-year run as TV's conman-cum-private investigator Remington Steele.

Brosnan also means to keep his post-Bond career vibrant by developing film projects for himself through his company Irish Dreamtime. Matador director Richard Shepard was originally planning to make the film as a $20,000 mini-budget item on digital video before Brosnan saw the potential and turned it into something much bigger.

"Bond allowed me to create Irish Dreamtime and make films like The Matador or Evelyn or The Thomas Crown Affair, and to have choices that wouldn't necessarily be open to me because of the thinking in Hollywood that you have your own style of acting or performance. I'd like to think I have more than one performance in me ..."

Ironically, for all his departures from the suave persona that informed both James Bond and Remington Steele, Brosnan hopes to bring Remington back in a big-screen version of the series. "The show is out on DVD now and so we have started negotiations on making a movie out of it," he says. "I think there's an audience there. There's a sentimental memory and fondness for it."

Before that, the 53-year-old actor has another subversive role on the cards: he'll play a brutal kidnapper who rips a family apart in Butterfly on a Wheel, and do a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair.

It's beginning to look like saying goodbye to Bond will give Brosnan a new start. "Life was a lot different when I was 24," he agrees, "but the hunger is just as fresh now as it was then to get better as an actor."

The Matador opens on 24 February.