A decade and a half after its release, Nick Cave’s The Death Of Bunny Munro has found new life on screen, with BINGE dropping the first official trailer for the six-part limited series ahead of its 20 November premiere in Australia. Based on Cave’s 2009 cult novel, the darkly comic and deeply tragic tale stars Matt Smith as Bunny Munro; a door-to-door beauty salesman, grieving widower, self-appointed ladies’ man, and father barely hanging onto the idea of fatherhood.
Cave, who has ventured seamlessly between literature, screenwriting, film music and stage across his career, now sees his bleakly funny and heartbreaking story examined in a new medium. The project continues Cave’s ongoing collaboration with Warren Ellis, with the longtime Bad Seeds partner co-composing the score. This pairing previously soundtracked films and series including The Proposition, The Road and Peaky Blinders, each shaped by Cave’s distinctive emotional undercurrent and Ellis’s sweeping experimental tension.
In The Death Of Bunny Munro, Smith plays a man spiralling after the suicide of his wife Libby, played by Sarah Greene. Bunny decides that the best response to his loss, and the sudden responsibility of raising his young son Bunny Junior (Rafael Mathé in his television debut), is to keep moving. What follows is a chaotic road trip along the Brighton coastline, where Bunny attempts to sell cosmetics and seduce any woman who crosses his path. Meanwhile, Junior tries to understand the grief consuming them both, speaking to the ghost of his mother as he confronts the reality that his father is far from the hero he once imagined.
The humour is pitch black, the pathos deeply human. What Cave explored on the page back in 2009, shortly after his work on The Proposition and while touring with The Bad Seeds, remains resonant today, especially in conversations about masculinity, responsibility and emotional survival. The book itself became a cult favourite upon release, and sat alongside Cave’s earlier novel And The Ass Saw The Angel as proof he was not just a rock icon, but a compelling literary voice.
Smith, BAFTA and Emmy-nominated for The Crown and seen in House Of The Dragon, brings Bunny’s fragile bravado and quiet collapse to life. Irish actor Sarah Greene gives Libby a lingering emotional presence, while David Threlfall appears as Bunny’s father, and Johann Myers, Robert Glenister, Alice Feetham, Lindsay Duncan and Elizabeth Berrington round out the cast. Pete Jackson (Somewhere Boy) adapts Cave’s novel for television, with direction by Isabella Eklöf (Industry, Holiday). Smith and Cave serve as executive producers.
The Death Of Bunny Munro reinforces Cave’s multi-disciplinary creative footprint, following a body of cinematic work and writing that has paralleled his storied music career since From Her To Eternity. As previously reported at Noise11, Cave’s creative partnership with Ellis continues to set a gold standard for emotional storytelling in music and screen. The series also marks another example of Cave’s uniquely Australian-shaped voice influencing international drama, though its story remains distinctly English in tone and setting.
The trailer hints at humour, tragedy and a father desperately trying – and failing – to hold his world together. When a social worker questions his unconventional approach to grief, Bunny responds, “Right now, that boy needs his father,” though neither seems convinced. Junior’s dawning realisation that his dad is not a role model, but a human wreck, drives the story toward redemption, or at least understanding.
BINGE will premiere The Death Of Bunny Munro on 20 November, with Australian audiences set to see Cave’s surreal and affecting vision arrive in all its unsettling glory.
Stay updated with your free Noise11.com daily music news email alert. Subscribe to Noise11 Music News here
Be the first to see NOISE11.com’s newest interviews and special features on YouTube. See things first—Subscribe to Noise11 on YouTube
Follow Noise11.com on social media:
Bluesky
Facebook – Comment on the news of the day
