When 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 me 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.”
