From Rebecca Murray,
Your Guide to Hollywood Movies.
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Greg Kinnear plays a businessman who needs to close an important deal in order to stay in the game in "The Matador," a comedy/drama/thriller from writer/director Richard Shepard.

Kinnear portrays a middle-class hard-working fellow who strikes up a conservation with a hitman (played by Pierce Brosnan) in a bar and winds up becoming the guy's best - and only - friend after just one action-packed weekend in each other's company.

Greg Kinnear Explains His Attraction to “The Matador:” Kinnear liked how his character in “The Matador” had almost as many neuroses as Pierce Brosnan’s character. Kinnear said his character’s quirks numbered about the same as Brosnan’s character’s, “but in a more repressed way, in a more inhibited, sort of middle America way. You know, we sweep those things nicely under the carpet. He wants to walk the happy line of just having everything in order, everything in its place. And of course, as you start to peel it back, he's a little more complicated than that. I mean, he does at the end help another man [spoiler deleted]. But he's at a desperate place at this point in the story, when you pick it up. He's in a really, really sad sort of desperate place, bordering on ruin, which is an awful place to be. I sort of responded in the script to how he was going to possibly find his way out of that, especially through a friendship forged with a guy who is pretty despicable.

It seems funny and uncertain where it was going. That was one of the good things, was that Richard crafted a script that was a buddy comedy, but it doesn't follow any of the - it seems to avoid a lot of the clichés in obvious places where it could go, which was really one of the strengths of it. A little unexpected.”

Greg Kinnear on Stealing Scenes: “The Matador” writer/director Richard Shepard said he hired Kinnear because of his ability to steal scenes from great actors. He wanted Kinnear onboard to challenge Pierce Brosnan. Asked if he was aware of Shepard’s high praise, Kinnear said, “Oh, lord. Oh, no. I did pay him good money to say that, but I didn’t think he was on that kind of payroll (laughing). I don’t know what to say to that. That’s very nice. But, you know, there was nothing to do here, really. Again, it was all there in the script, and when I read the script I actually wasn’t sure that it was right for me. I thought, ‘Well, if I don’t do this, I’m definitely going to go to see it in the theater. And if I do do it, I get to watch this from a front-row seat.’

It was kind of cool to be there to watch James Bond in a pair of cowboy boots and skivvies walk through a hotel lobby. A little trivia about that, by the way: we were staying in that hotel, the Camino Real, and they didn’t really shut it down for the movie. They weren’t shutting down a hotel for us, for god’s sake. So what people don’t realize is that as Pierce is walking through that hotel lobby, only about half of those people who look horrified are actors. The other people are paying customers going, ‘Is that Pierce Brosnan?’”

Kinnear didn’t have to be on the set that day but showed up just to watch Brosnan film that scene. “Actually, I’m not a big guy to show up. That doesn’t sound so good, does it? I don’t tend to hang around sets too much. But I did manage to mosey down to the lobby that particular afternoon just to take a peek. [Mimes peering around a corner] ‘Ooh, he’s really committing! He’s in!’ He’s all in as they say in Texas Hold ‘Em.’”

Greg Kinnear on Filming in Mexico: “The Matador” was shot in Mexico City and director Shepard said he believes filming the movie there was freeing for his actors. Kinnear said he’s not sure how making the movie in Mexico influenced his performance. “You know, in which ways it’s hard to say specifically. It’s only a three-hour flight but it feels like a far away place. It’s an incredible city. It’s a beautiful, beautiful city, and it’s really a great character in the movie the way David Tattersall shot it. I think that it felt like, while we were doing it, anything was possible down there. We had fun doing it and we had a good script to begin with, but there was a great sense of excitement being down there that fed into the whole undercurrent of what’s going on with these two guys that was kind of cool.”

Greg Kinnear on Bonding with Pierce Brosnan: “I didn’t know him. I found out I was going to do the movie, and then we ended up at a party together. We met and had a beer. And we didn’t really do any rehearsal here; we sat around a table and read it through, like, once. I really didn’t know. Then we got down there and it just seemed to click in pretty good. It was like day one and all of us had a lot of chips riding on Julian Noble coming to life, and it was pretty quick that we realized that he had found a guy that was going to be there.”

Page 2: Kinnear on Interesting Scripts, "Little Miss Sunshine," "Invincible, and "Unknown"