No, Pierce Brosnan will not be playing James Bond anymore, and he’s really sick of talking about it. But he was kind enough to set the record straight. It happened on the set of his new film, After the Sunset.
“I had just had lunch,” Brosnan recalled. “I was about to do scene 49 with Salma. I didn't know what I was going to do, but the phone rang and certainly the agent said, 'Negotiations have stopped.'”
Brosnan tried to keep this story out of the press for as long as possible, since he has to face reporters several times a year for all the movies in which he stars. “We were seeing how far we could go with it and not trying to show our hand. There's so much game playing in this. They call the shots and they can hide easy. They can hide easier than I can because I have to talk. They can just take a back seat and do nothing. It is what it is. But I didn't want to say anything or do anything because it was a real body blow because you think that you're going in this direction, and if the last film hadn't acquitted itself or the one before that hadn't acquitted itself or any of them, I would've thought, 'Okay, well, I just didn't cut the mustard.' But because they were such a progression of box office successes, it seemed right to do a fifth. I was happy to do a fifth. They invited me back on the heels of doing the other, before I did the promotion for the last one. Then in the middle of negotiations, they just went [pull the rug out.] So it was a pisser. It was annoying. It's just some drama in my life. “
Now that it’s all over, it is actually a relief. “There's a great sense of liberation. You kind of go, 'Oh, alright. Fair enough.' I got over it fairly quickly actually. I just thought, 'Time to move on. Fine.' You just know that you have to talk about it and talk about it.”
As for all those reports that he’d like Colin Farrell to succeed him, Brosnan says that comment was taken out of context. “That was in Dublin on the weekend. I was in Dublin with a pint of Guinness. 'Yeah. Give it to that fucking Colin Farrell lad. He'll make a f*cking great James f*cking Bond.'”
With a Thomas Crown Affair sequel in the works, and After the Sunset open ended, Brosnan could have another franchise on his hands soon enough. “It would be great if we could pull of Thomas Crown. It was a mighty achievement that we hit the notes that we did and set the bar as high as we did with the last one. So they're kind of daunting, certainly Crown is.”
Like Crown, After the Sunset is a heist movie with romantic undertones. Brosnan plays a retired diamond thief tempted for one last job when a cruise ship stops in his Bahamas home carrying a valuable diamond. Brosnan has always been a fan of the genre.
“I grew up on them. The Anderson Tapes, The Italian Job, To Catch A Thief. That's the ultimate blueprint in many ways. When I doing Remington Steele and Bob Butler was the director, he said, 'We're doing an old movie here.' So immersed myself back in '81 into movies with Carey Grant and Spencer Tracy. Maybe something stuck, maybe some sense of performance.”
Shot on location in the Bahamas, Brosnan enjoyed the down time as much as the work. “Are you kidding me? There was no acting required. That was half the reason for choosing the picture. When you're making a movie, some days you're not sure if you're going to work or not, but the scene was wonderful, the people were great to work with. Everyone has fun and had a sense of occasion of just working together and liking each other.”
Brosnan was considering several scripts at the time, and After the Sunset stood out. “I just read it and I guess because we're trying to work on Thomas Crown II and something happened there that my imagination didn't go that far from what we were trying to do with this a second time around. There were a couple of other things, but I thought that this was commercial. I thought that this could be as I said a nice ensemble piece. It's juggling a few genres there of heist and romance and buddy movie. That's really what it was about. I mean, I read this and I thought that it could have legs to be an entertaining movie and ensemble piece with a bit of heist, with a bit of romance, a buddy movie.”
A fan of director Brett Ratner, having once sought him to direct a 007 movie, Brosnan credits him with pulling the film together. “He really with a Herculean effort brought this to what you see. It's because he's got a good finger that's on the pulse of, I think, the pop culture of life and music and what's sexy. He has a passion for making films. You search out all of that and hopefully you have a good time and hopefully it'll come across, like you said, onscreen. I must say that there were moments on days where I was like, 'I'm not quite sure what this is going to be.'”
And as for Brosnan’s scruffy bearded look in the film, that was only temporary. Appearing for press with no facial hair, Brosnan admitted his wife’s preference. “She likes me clean-shaven.” |
