When Nick Cave first watched Matt Smith embody Bunny Munro — the sex‑obsessed, door‑to‑door salesman from his 2009 novel The Death of Bunny Munro — he was surprised. In the book, Cave says, Bunny is an unsuccessful lothario whom women treat like a joke. Smith, by contrast, is “hot,” and that attractiveness adds complexity: when Matt’s Bunny hits on women, they respond, which changes how the character reads on screen.
Cave’s darkly comic tale of sex, guilt and grief has been adapted as a TV series, with Smith — known for Doctor Who and The Crown — as the man unraveling after his wife’s suicide. Having taken his son, Bunny sets off on a chaotic road trip, clinging to his job and desires as his life collapses. Smith says he agreed to play Bunny immediately after meeting Cave, calling it “an amazing opportunity and challenge to play a man pushed to the edge by grief, sex and life.”
Cave, now 68, revisits one of his morally complex creations and insists Bunny isn’t wholly bad. “When I look at Bunny, I don’t see an aberration,” he says. “He’s a flawed human being struggling with grief, his own legacy and all the things that make us human.” Smith’s version leans beguiling and dangerous; his appeal makes Bunny’s downfall harder to dismiss. “He’s selfish and difficult, but also funny, mad and kind of charismatic,” Smith explains. “He’s human and I saw the good in him… I became quite attached to him.”
That tension — repellent and relatable at once — gives the story its emotional weight. Smith describes it as “a really touching story about a father and son,” and Cave agrees, saying it reminds him to hug his children and reflects “the vulnerability of our children and of the need to hold them while there’s still time.”
Set in 2003 Brighton, the adaptation is a period piece close enough to the present to feel familiar but distant enough to show how the world and its tolerance for men like Bunny have changed. Both men stop short of declaring the show a statement on masculinity. Smith calls it a tale of “the sins of the father and about Bunny Junior breaking that cycle.” Cave frames it as a story about inheritance — what we take from our parents and what we decide to leave behind. Little Bunny needs to escape his chaotic father for safety, yet Bunny’s essential goodness means we wouldn’t want the son to lose everything of him.
Cave adds that the story also probes “how we deal with our own nature and humanity.” That humanity has long been central to his work; his songs and characters often reflect personal experience. Cave’s life has been marked by tragedy: his son Arthur died in 2015 after a fall in Brighton, and his eldest son Jethro died aged 30 in 2022. He has written about the “vastness” of his grief and how those losses changed him. He left Brighton for Los Angeles, then returned, saying sadness travels with you.
Though Bunny Munro is not autobiographical, Cave says he understood the character’s interior — “that first impulse towards being in the world” — from his own life in music, even if he’s not someone who went about seducing women. Cave admits he is, in truth, “much shyer around women,” confessing he’s “quite terrified of women and their power” and never entirely comfortable with them. Still, he argues even despicable characters in his work aren’t removed from him; they form part of a complex whole.
The Death of Bunny Munro is on Sky Atlantic from 20 November.
