By Jenny Halper in New York City

Pierce Brosnan stars in Richard Shephard’s new black comedy “The Matador” as a hit man who’s the very antithesis of James Bond. Sure, Brosnan’s Julian Noble totes guns and helps himself to “all the teenaged twat in Thailand,” but he also paints his toenails black, has a worrisome drinking problem (more than one martini here), and suffers from shaky sanity that raises the stakes in a hilarious third act.

Brosnan, who liked Shephard’s script so much he backed the film as a producer, met with press earlier this month. Dressed down and sporting a slightly scraggly beard, Ireland’s suavest dreamboat made it clear he wanted his image shaken, not just stirred.

Q: Did you like playing a contract killer?

PIERCE: I loved playing in this movie. Richard Shepard came bearing gifts. It happened at a very wonderful time in life. I thought it was wildly entertaining. I never knew when the story was going to twist and turn. I thought we could make a cool, slick, hip independent movie and get away with it. I thought there were jokes in there which the audience would get in abundance because of my past performances- one in particular.

Q: Julian is a pretty outrageous character, and it would be easy for the audience not to like him. How do you keep us on your side?

PIERCE: You try and get them from the very beginning. The fellow wakes up with some broad in the bed and audiences have seen Brosnan do that before. You’re messed up, not sure if you’re having a heart attack or a seizure, then you paint your toenails. That dismantles everything from the get go. He’s got an arrested development. He tells a little boy to “F-off” and then says some kind of nursery rhyme, “See you wouldn’t want to be you.” You know this man is not quite all there. You’re not sure what he’s looking for. As an audience member, you’re not even sure if Brosnan is in the right movie, or if you’re in the right theatre. The killing, schmilling, whatever, there is no violence. It’s a man who is having a rough time, who happens to kill people.

Q: Did you have any adventures filming in Mexico?

PIERCE: There was such trepidation going on down there because it has been painted in colors of violence and kidnapping and there is an underbelly of civilization that is desperate and poor. I came away with the art. I came away with the painters, the work I saw. I set up my own studio because I paint. I started as an artist of some sort and I still continue that. We had bodyguards and armored vehicles- that was strange. It was a small community of actors, we were all passionate for it. The Mexican crew embraced us and we embraced them back.

Q: Who are your favorite painters?

PIERCE: Georgia O’Keefe permeates that part of the world when I’m filming. Matisse, Picasso, Impressionists.

Q: Would you be a painter if you weren’t an actor?

PIERCE: I don’t think I could make a living at it, but I would be in the arts in some way or another. It’s just a hobby. I’m an enthusiastic painter. I think about when all this goes away just sitting out there in Hawaii painting.

Q: How would you describe your ideal project?

PIERCE: I like projects that have some kind of humanity and some kind of emotional content that makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me want to turn the page. Desmond Doyle in “Evelyn,” Julian Noble in “The Matador,” two different films, but the same film really. The same film because they have a certain heartbeat to them, religion to them, heartbeat to them, faith in them, one man who is fighting for his kids and this is a man who is brother-less, lost and looking for life, looking for love.

Q: You’ve done projects that seem to be based on pure fantasy, but your characters always deliver a great deal of truth within the fantasy. Is that part of the criteria?

PIERCE: Isn’t it the essence of acting- truthfulness? Sometimes I haven’t had the confidence of the material or the relaxation of the performance and it becomes wobbly. But when you have good text and good actors, you just try to play with truthfulness and play with heart. But I think if you can do it without words in cinema, that’s the best.

Q: How do you go from filming something like Bond to focusing on craft?

PIERCE: I always see myself as an actor first and foremost. I’m an actor, that’s my job. Movie star, I certainly wanted to be a part of that echelon of actors, I certainly wanted to play a movie star . I’ve played movie star and now I want to go back to being an actor. I have always been an actor. It’s getting a performance and this film allowed me to give a performance. It came at just the right moment in life.

Q: What draws you to the smooth womanizer roles?

PIERCE: I get to live normal happy life with wife and children, and then I get to go out to the world and live it in the movies. I suppose I dreamt of being a movie star before I became an actor. It was an amazing escapism for me, love, romance, getting the girl.

Q: Is movie star a separate role? Do you ever feel pressed to be someone different for the press?

PIERCE: No. I try to be me all the time. I try to be me as much as possible.

Q: What was unique about Richard Shephard’s style of direction?

PIERCE: Hope (Davis), Greg (Kinnear) and I came to it because he put the roadmap down so well. We all saw the funny side, we saw the irony of it. He’s telling me about his dead son and the tragedy, margaritas and cock. Now we’re happy and now I’m going to tell him a dirty joke about a guy with a 15 inch schlong. So as actors you know this is coming, you know that this is going to turn the audience around. I’m watching him give a sincere performance. We couldn’t get through it a few times. So Richard didn’t have to direct. It was very simple.

Q: What’s your favorite moment in the film?

PIERCE: He (Julian) just had such an organic life. He became bigger than my wildest dreams. I love the third act it gets into a Joe Orton type world. I like the theatricality of that. It’s just the lines. “A Vietnamese girl I once knew had her legs…..” It’s not a one liner, it’s a paragraph. I’m just trying to pitch those lines.

Q: Did you have any say in the cast?

PIERCE: When I read it, we had a play reading and we listened to it and recorded it. Hope (Davis) was there from the beginning, she was Bean. And she said “you gotta do this movie.”

Q: Have you ever had a strange encounter in a bar, like your character has with Greg’s in the movie?

PIERCE: I had one when the war was going on. The man was a soldier and a hit man and he drank and he cried and he wept. He talked about the killings. He talked about being in Bosnia and taking people down. He was just crying and weeping. It was a pretty heavy night.

Q: Did that help prepare you for this role?

PIERCE: Not really. That was a deep tragedy; that was a deep reality. This is a heightened theatricality. I gave the script to friends in the LAPD. They gave me the foundation. Psychopaths are charming and the greatest actors of all.

Q: What’s you favorite type of bar?

PIERCE: I’m Irish, you know, I like bars.

Q: Do you like dive bars?

PIERCE: Guy bars?

Q: No, dive bars.

PIERCE: Oh, dive bars. Guy bars, I’d rather not. I’ve got a healthy sense of who I am, but I’d rather be looking at something beautiful and lovely of the opposite sex. As an actor it’s a gypsy life. You get into a town and have a beer. It’s a way of meeting people, hanging out.

Q: What’s your favorite drink?

PIERCE: A glass of pinot noir, although a good martini certainly can lift the spirits at the end of a long day.

Q: Are you producing anything else right now?

PIERCE: “Butterfly on a Wheel,” this thriller that we’re going to try and do. It’s a tight little piece. We’re going to shoot it in San Francisco. We have a film called the “True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle” with Danny Devito and Morgan Freedman. Danny adapted the book. It’s a period piece in set 1832. Danny wanted me for the role of captain and asked me to produce it. Hopefully, we will go off to New Zealand and make it.

Q: In “Butterfly on a Wheel,” you play an evil killer…

PIERCE: I wanted to play as many things as possible. There is no reason why I can’t go off and try and do “Thomas Crown Affair II.” It just depends on how good the script is.

Q: What drives you in your career? Is it fear or desire?

PIERCE: Fear, desire, lust, ambition, money, that’s what it’s all about. Tuesday is different than Thursday. I have always had a strong healthy ambition and desire and certainly a passion for work. I love being an actor. I love everything I have ever done. Whether the audience liked it or not was sometimes painful. But I just love being an actor, I love the life of acting and reading and literature.

Q: What’s the best book you’ve read this year?

PIERCE: I have been steeping myself in the Civil War and “The Killer Angels” is amazing and “The March” is great.

Q: And “Seraphim Falls,” the film you’re working on with Liam Neeson, is about the Civil War, right?

PIERCE: It’s a post Civil War western. I play a Yankee Captain, and Liam Neeson plays a confederate. Liam and I are having the time of our lives. A couple of Irishmen, a couple of paddies on horses.

Q: Are you a fan of history?

PIERCE: It comes and goes. A whole year can go by and I won’t read a book and then I will try and catch up. Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” I bought it for my son, because we needed good literature and we’re reading it together.

Q: What do you think about this new actor playing Bond? He’s not exactly a tough-looking guy.

PIERCE: Daniel Craig will be great. He’s a fine actor, and I wish him well. There is a new chapter for Bond, and a new chapter for Brosnan.

“The Matador” opens in New York and LA on December 30th, and nationwide in January.