How The Matador's Bisexual Hit Man Missed the Gay Target

For Shepard, the Julian Noble character - and the film - began with Julian's line, "Margaritas always taste better in Mexico. Margaritas and c**k." Shepard says that from that point on, "I didn't have an outline, and I didn't really know what was going to happen to the plot. I was keeping my options open: Maybe Julian and Danny [played by Greg Kinnear] had sex in Mexico. And that subtext really helped the tension of the film. Many audiences wondered if that was the plot twist."

Shepard adds, "Like any writer, I was looking for red herrings, and the gay thing is a fantastic red herring, because in the world we set up you could buy that it [Julian and Danny having sex] could happen."

Shepard strongly disagrees that there is no indication in the film that Julian actually has sex with men, except for a couple of suggestive comments that could be construed as jokes. "He [Julian] is talking about c*** tasting better, he's going to a sex club where men f*** men, he says he f***ed the bellboy on the room service cart," Shepard says. "If my 74-year-old mother understood that he swung both ways, I assume most audiences did as well."

But how much same-sex content was in his initial vision for the film? How did that change along the way and why? Shepard says, "In the original script it went further, where we saw Julian f*** men." It was this material, Shepard explains, along with some over-the-top, lewd humor that Brosnan wanted toned down, and cuts along these lines were made to the script before filming.

The widely reported quote from Brosnan implies that most of this content identified the character as sexually interested in men, and Shepard says there was initially more suggestive gay content that was cut from the script, but insists it was part of broader lewd humor - "gay, straight fat, thin" is how he puts it - that was cut.

Shepard also maintains that Brosnan wanted the cuts "not because of the gay stuff per se, but because he was rightly worried that there's a thin line between a likeable rogue and an unlikable rogue."

In the film, Brosnan's likeable rogue wakes up with a naked woman, later is seen having vigorous sex with a woman, playfully spanks a hot female hooker as he follows her into a brothel, and is constantly eyeing and coming on to women. If any similar scenes from the original script with Julian involving male partners had been included, would he have been less likeable? Perhaps, but should Shepard and Brosnan have cared? It may be that Brosnan, who declined to be interviewed for this article because he was working on location, was concerned about how acting in gay sex scenes might affect his image.

Shepard says there was another reason same-sex content was taken out of the script: "[Brosnan] also thought that we would get an X rating in America, and that was a strong argument. The ratings board is homophobic and awful, and I certainly wasn't making a half-million-dollar art film. There was a lot of money being spent, and we needed a movie that could get released."

This is an unfortunate but not entirely unrealistic concern. The double standard the MPAA often applies to gay content is well-laid out in the recent documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Recent films such as Bent and Basic Instinct 2 have had same-sex content targeted by the MPAA, but films such as Kinsey and Brokeback Mountain, which include gay sex scenes, have avoided NC-17 ratings.

Shepard says the only same-sex content that was actually filmed and later cut was an image of two men having sex in a sex club that was eventually trimmed down to "barely there." Again, Shepard emphasizes, "because we were told we would get an X-rating."