According to Nick Cave, no fewer than four production companies have previously attempted to adapt for screen his violent, transgressive 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. Each failed because no actor was willing to take on the title role – until now. Enter Matt Smith. If the 11th Doctor seems an odd choice to play such a misogynistic, priapic, amoral character, remember Smith has also starred as Patrick Bateman in the stage adaptation of American Psycho and as the mercurial niece-shagger Daemon Targaryen in House of the Dragon. I mean no offence to Smith when I say he is rather good at embodying sadists and psychopaths.
Bunny is a rakish, sex-addicted travelling salesman who employs his carnal powers of persuasion to get his middle-aged female clients to invest in age-defying cosmetic creams. We first meet Bunny splayed on the bed of a grotty hotel room in his pants. His wife, Libby (Sarah Greene), who suffers from depression, calls him and begs him to come home. Brighton Pier is burning, she says; she can smell the smoke from their flat. “I would if I could,” he replies, watching the same blaze out of the hotel window, “I’m miles and miles away.” Responsibilities shaken off, he turns his, ahem, attentions to the woman emerging from the en suite. The series must have employed one very busy intimacy coordinator. The next morning he returns home to find Libby has taken her own life, leaving behind their sweet, encyclopaedia-obsessed son, Bunny Jnr (Rafael Mathé), whose age his father can’t quite recall.
To give you some idea of just what a vile character Bunny Snr is, within the first episode he: leaves the chapel during Libby’s funeral to masturbate over the sink in the bathroom (18 minutes in and I’d counted at least three wanks, self-inflicted or otherwise); attempts to fob off the care of his son on Libby’s parents, then, when they refuse, dances vindictively before her wheelchair-bound father, just because he can. Unsurprisingly, social services turn up the morning after the “after party” (Libby’s wake), at which point Bunnies Snr and Jnr exit through a window and go on the run.
Thus begins a roadtrip that in the hands of perhaps any other writer would be a heartwarming tale of father-son bonding. Instead, Bunny Snr, an increasingly self-destructive ball of pain and fury, drags Bunny Jnr around on business, leaving him in the vintage Vauxhall soft-top, or wandering the streets while he sees to his clients. The narrative becomes more surreal as the show progresses through its six episodes, and the further its protagonist devolves.
If this sounds like a challenging proposition, it is, in the hands of the screenwriter Pete Jackson, at least more palatable than the book. In this new medium, Bunny’s internal monologue with its violent and graphic fantasies, is happily absent: he may do some terrible things, but what he can imagine is far worse. The other major change from the source material is that in the book, Bunny is not just morally but physically repulsive to most of his attempted conquests. Smith, with his moai statue face, has a lithe, craggy handsomeness, and – am I allowed to say this? – a perfect bottom. That Smith’s Bunny is, well, hot is, to use Cave’s word, “problematic”. The effect is a discomforting complicity that recalls Jamie Dornan’s performance in The Fall. (If you require a metaphorical bucket of cold water at any point, recall that Smith has also played Prince Philip.)
Mathé is exquisite as Bunny Jnr, a tender foil to his father’s depravity. He both blindly adores him – “He’s the best salesman in the world,” Jnr boasts – and seems to know he has seen things no child should. He has a childish bowl haircut but the dark circles of a man. In one devastating scene, he cowers in a corner of a strip joint while his father leers, and has an imagined conversation with his mother. “Weird, isn’t it?” she says. “You don’t have to understand it, you know, it’s OK to be a little boy who loves spaceships.” Then the stripper removes her bikini top, and Bunny Jnr lets out a false cheer, his eyes dead. He appears to have startled himself. It’s a picture of a miserable masculinity, passed from father to son, and on and on.
If you like your TV escapist and cosy, or with some sort of redemptive arc, The Death of Bunny Munro is probably not for you. But the brave will be rewarded: this is crushing, bruising, brilliant television.
[See also: Pluribus’s very polite zombies]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand