In Evelyn, Pierce Brosnan plays a working-class father fighting for custody of his children after his wife abandons the family. It's a role that sees him cry, keeps his hair permanently dishevelled and, most shocking of all, lose a fistfight with a priest in a pub brawl. This quivering, ripe heap of manhood is a sight that would leave Brosnan's better-known alter ego, James Bond, shaken, not stirred.

It sounds like a stretch for the 49-year-old Irish actor, but Brosnan has been taking on a lot of new roles lately. He's actually the producer behind Evelyn. The movie, rolling into theatres on Friday, is the third project from Irish DreamTime, Brosnan's own production company that started a few years ago.

"It gives you creative control," he says about the benefits of being on the more cellphone-chatting, latte-drinking, dinner-eating side of moviemaking.

"You get to pick your projects. If Miramax was making Evelyn, I don't think I'd be on anybody's list. Maybe I'm selling myself short. Harvey [Weinstein] says he wants me, but he hasn't given me a job. He keeps saying 'We wanted you but you were busy.' 'No, Harvey, I wasn't.'

"That's okay, Harvey, don't worry, I've got my own company, Irish DreamTime. Day's end, we'll have a good old bagful of films on the go hopefully."

For an actor -- and producer -- who's done almost nothing but non-stop press through his minuscule stay in Toronto during the film festival, he's surprisingly calm. Wearing a blue striped button-down shirt, open at the collar, light blue trousers and suede loafers, he doesn't look even remotely like a sex symbol or even a movie star -- although those piercing, light blue eyes are kind of hypnotic.

And though you can tell he hates the publicity process, he willingly submits: "It's part of the game, isn't it? You sell movies."

In the past, Brosnan has blasted the American movie industry for its lack of imagination. "People's sensitivities have been deadened and I think they backed themselves into a corner in this town called Hollywood," he told Reuters two years ago when Grey Owl, starring Brosnan as an Englishman who went to live among native Canadians in the 1930s, went straight to video in the United States.

The family-friendly Evelyn isn't going to be too much of a hard sell. The film is based on a real-life, precedent-setting Irish custody battle in the 1950s. Brosnan's character, Desmond Doyle, fought the government for the right to bring up his own children.

At the time, even in a heavily male-centric Catholic society, single fathers suffered discrimination. Widowers or men dumped by their wives would often find themselves at risk of losing their children to orphanages if they were considered unfit or unable to raise the children.

Since Doyle was a contract painter and decorator and often out of work, the government felt it was doing a service when it stepped in and sent the children to be wards of the Catholic schools. But when Doyle found a job, he found that, by law, he had no right to custody of the children. He took his case all the way to the Irish Supreme Court. With crucial testimony from his daughter Evelyn (played by the candy-sweet Sophie Vavasseur in the film), he won.

While the film sounds dark, it's no Angela's Ashes. The touching father-daughter scenes between Doyle and Evelyn come perilously close to Hallmark movie-of-the-week territory. As Doyle's legal team, a terrifically dour Stephen Rea, a boisterous Aidan Quinn and the inimitable Alan Bates inject a lot of energy and smarts into Doyle's quest. Julianna Margulies provides the heat as Doyle's love interest, Bernadette.

"I love the story, because you can read so many Irish scripts and they're just maudlin and mawkish, but this one had a levity to it that gave it a lovely buoyancy," Brosnan said. "And yet, as you turned the pages, you laughed and you kind of choked. and I thought that was great."

Although he shies away from making it too big an issue, Evelyn's story has some parallels with Brosnan's own life. Born and raised in Navan, Ireland, he was only a few years old when his father abandoned the family. Stowing the children with her parents, Brosnan's mother moved to England to study nursing.

Brosnan experienced the strict Catholic school system firsthand, and still seems a little shell-shocked when he discusses the subject.

"I was educated by the Christian Brothers. They were a motley crew of fellows, some of whom were quite sadistic. There were some very fine men there who carried the true meaning of the word of religion. But there are others who are just mangled. They were frustrated deeply and that would be taken out on a six-year-old boy with a thumping or kicking or beating. I saw it and I had it done to me -- I was strapped -- and that just angered and pissed me off."

Brosnan said he would have preferred to go even further with the depiction of the horrors of Catholic schools, but he's also glad that director Bruce Beresford reined those images in.

"I certainly think the film will have some relevance to the Catholic Church [in light of the scandals] -- how could it not? But I think the film has the balance of good and bad that the role of the church in our society has."

In his personal life, Brosnan sounds more Doyle than Bond. He lives a normal family life in Malibu, Calif., with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, and three children. He beams with pride when he mentions that he took his son to his first day of Grade 1 when school started in September.

So what's next? Would he ever want complete creative control, say, behind the camera, or to write a script? He says he doesn't think he has the stamina to be a director and, while he dabbles in writing, he's not trading his makeup for a Montblanc any time soon.

"I've written poetry and bits of journals. I have a great many paragraphs of novels -- but only paragraphs," he says self-deprecatingly. "You can't just talk about it -- you have to do it."

The company is looking at other Irish stories, but also has its eye on an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's epic poem Lochinvar about the Crusades. One thing that Brosnan does want to do is pick up 007's martini glass one last time. With the release last month of Die Another Day,the 20th James Bond film in the franchise and Brosnan's fourth outing in the role, Brosnan's contract is up. Despite reports that he said he was bored with the role, Brosnan now says he'd like to take at least one more crack at it.

"I'm very happy having the world of Bond over here, the financial security of that, the great bravado of that, mixed with the intimacy of something like an Evelyn. That fills me with a good heart and contentment."

Even James Bond would raise a glass to that sentiment.