Getty ImagesWhen Nick Cave first saw Matt Smith playing Bunny Munro – the sex-obsessed door-to-door salesman from his 2009 novel The Death of Bunny Munro – he was taken aback.
“In the book, Bunny’s not good at what he does – he wants to sleep with everyone he can and he’s an unsuccessful lothario who women treat like a joke,” Cave explains.
“Whereas Matt is hot and that adds a complexity that the original Bunny didn’t have because when Matt’s Bunny hits on women, they kind of like it and he draws them in.”
The Australian musician’s darkly comic tale of sex, guilt and grief has been reimagined as a TV series with Doctor Who and The Crown star Smith taking on the titular role of a man spiralling after his wife’s suicide.
Having kidnapped his son, Bunny sets off on a chaotic road trip, clinging to his job and desires as everything else falls apart around him.
Smith says that he signed up to play Bunny immediately after he first met Cave – and thought the role was “an amazing opportunity and challenge to play a man pushed to the edge by grief, sex and life”.
For Cave, the project revisits one of his morally complex characters and the 68-year-old stands by the fact that Bunny isn’t wholly a bad person.
“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.”
Sky UKSmith agrees and his version of Bunny is more beguiling and dangerous, and his appeal makes his downfall harder to dismiss.
“He’s selfish and difficult, but also funny, mad and kind of charismatic,” he explains. “He’s human and I saw the good in him, thought he was quite funny and became quite attached to him.”
It’s that tension of Bunny being both repellent and relatable that gives the story its emotional punch.
Smith says that beneath the chaos, it’s “a really touching story about a father and son”.
Cave nods in agreement, adding that the tale of Bunny makes him want to hug his kids.
“It’s a reminder of the vulnerability of our children and of the need to hold them while there’s still time.”
Set in 2003 in Brighton, the adaptation turns Cave’s novel into a period piece that feels close enough to the present day but distant enough to reflect how the world, and its tolerance for men like Bunny, has changed.
But both men resist saying that the show makes a statement about masculinity.
“That’s for other people to decide,” Smith says. “But for me, it’s really a story about the sins of the father and about Bunny Junior breaking that cycle.”
Cave calls it a story about inheritance – what we carry from our parents and what we choose to leave behind.
“Little Bunny needs to get away from his father as he’s chaotic and a threat to his safety but Bunny is essentially good and we wouldn’t want his son to escape those parts of him.”
Sky UKThe singer also suggests it’s much deeper than an exploration of masculinity as it reflects “how we deal with our own nature and humanity.”
That sense of humanity has always been at the core of Cave’s work and his music with The Bad Seeds is “essentially autobiographical”.
In 2015, Cave’s son Arthur died after falling from a cliff in Brighton and in 2022 his eldest son, Jethro, died at the age of 30.
The singer has previously written about the “vastness” of his grief and about how the death of his sons changed him.
He also moved to Los Angeles because “Brighton had just become too sad” but he later returned after he “realised that, regardless of where we lived, we just took our sadness with us”.
“If you listen to my songs and the words, they paint a very clear picture of what I’m like and what I’ve gone through,” he tells the . “Even the despicable characters, they’re not removed from me, they are just part of a complex character.”
In contrast, Cave explains that Bunny Munro isn’t autobiographical but there is some overlap between his life and that of his creation.
“I wasn’t writing about someone I didn’t understand,” he says. “I felt extremely connected to Bunny – not that I went around trying to seduce women, though there was a bit of that, being in a band and all – but that interior masculine monologue, that first impulse towards being in the world.
“Most men, if they’re honest, understand Bunny on some level.”
However, Cave says that where he differs most from Bunny is when it comes to women as he’s “much shyer around women”.
His confession strips away any rock-star bravado as he admits that he’s “quite terrified of women and their power and I’ve just never been that comfortable around them”.
The Death of Bunny Munro is on Sky Atlantic from 20 November.
