Nick Cave and Matt Smith on bringing a sex addict salesman to life

Nick Cave was stunned when he first saw Matt Smith playing Bunny Munro (the sex-obsessed door-to-door salesman in the 2009 novel The Death of Bunny Munro).

“In the book, Bunny isn’t very good at what he does; he wants to sleep with anyone he can find and is a failed playboy who women treat like a joke,” Cave explains.

“Whereas Matt is very hot and that adds a complexity that the original Bunny didn’t have because when Matt’s Bunny hits on women, they like it and he attracts them.”

The Australian musician’s darkly funny tale of sex, guilt and grief has been reimagined as a TV series, with Doctor Who and The Crown star Smith taking on the role of a man reeling after his wife’s suicide.

After kidnapping his son, Bunny embarks on a chaotic journey, holding on to his job and desires as everything around him falls apart.

Smith says he signed up to play Bunny immediately after first arriving at Cave, and thought the role was “an incredible opportunity and challenge to play a man pushed aside by grief, sex, and life.”

For Cave, the project revisits one of his morally complex characters and champions the fact that 68-year-old Bunny is not a completely bad person.

“When I look at Bunny, I don’t see any deviation,” he says. “He is a flawed human being struggling with grief, his own legacy, and everything that makes us human.”

Smith agrees, and it is noted that his version of Bunny is more seductive and dangerous, making his downfall hard to deny.

“He’s selfish and demanding, but he’s also funny and crazy and kind of charismatic,” he explains. “He’s a human being and I saw the goodness in him, I thought he was pretty funny and I got pretty attached to him.”

It’s the tension created by Bunny being both repulsive and relatable that gives the story its emotional impact.

Beneath the chaos is “a really touching story about a father and son,” says Smith.

Cave nodded in agreement and added that the Bunny story made him want to hug his children.

“This is a reminder of the vulnerability of our children and the need to embrace them while there is still time.”

Set in Brighton in 2003, the adaptation transforms Cave’s novel into a period piece close enough to the present but distant enough to reflect how the world and tolerance towards men like Bunny have changed.

But both men resist saying the series is making a statement about masculinity.

“That’s for others to decide,” Smith says. “But for me, it’s really a story about the sins of the father and Bunny Junior breaking that cycle.”

Cave calls it a story about legacy; what we carry from our parents and what we choose to leave behind.

“Little Bunny needs to get away from his father because he is chaotic and threatens his safety, but Bunny is actually fine and we wouldn’t want his son to escape those parts of him.”

The singer also suggests that this is much deeper than an exploration of masculinity, as it reflects “how we deal with our own nature and humanity.”

This sense of humanity has always been at the heart of Cave’s work, and the music he makes with The Bad Seeds is “essentially autobiographical”.

Cave’s son Arthur died after falling off a cliff in Brighton in 2015, and his eldest son Jethro died in 2022, aged 30.

The singer has written about this before. the “breadth” of his grief and about how The death of his sons changed him.

She also moved to Los Angeles because “Brighton was too sad now” but later returned “after realizing that no matter where we live, we take our sadness with us.”

“If you listen to my songs and my lyrics, they reveal very clearly what kind of person I am and what I’ve been through,” he tells the BBC. “Even the despicable characters are not taken out of me, they are just part of a complex character.”

In contrast, Cave explains that Bunny Munro is not autobiographical, but there is some overlap between her life and the life she creates.

“I wasn’t writing about someone I didn’t understand,” he says. “I felt extremely connected to Bunny – not that I was going around seducing women, although there was a bit of being in a band and all that – but that inner masculine monologue, that primal urge to be in the world.

“Most men understand Bunny on some level if they’re honest.”

But Cave says where he differs most from Bunny is when it comes to women, because he’s “much more shy around women.”

His confession strips away his rock star bravado, admitting he’s “pretty scared of women and their power, and I’ve never been more comfortable around them.”

The Death of Munro the Rabbit is on Sky Atlantic from 20 November.