The Death of Bunny Munro: Matt Smith, Nick Cave and the strange, seductive pull of Brighton
Interview with Edith Bowman
The Death of Bunny Munro is a story that rides the fault line between chaos and tenderness and its adaptation arrives with a charge of pent-up energy. It is a show steeped in place, shaped by a century of Brighton mythology and sharpened by Nick Cave’s darkly comic imagination.
Sitting together, Edith, Matt and Nick speak with the casual intimacy of people who have just lived inside the same fever dream. The series may follow a salesman in freefall, but its power lies in the alchemy of performance, place and perspective.
“It’s been 20 years since it was conceived.”
Nick Cave
Nick reflects on the book’s long road to the screen with a raised eyebrow and a sense of disbelief. “It’s been 20 years since it was conceived,” he says. “Many people have tried to make it into a film and it just kept collapsing for one reason or another and I’d sort of given up hope really.”
What rescued it was an unexpected constellation of collaborators.
Nick’s son had worked with the directing duo on The End of the F***ing World, which caught Nick’s eye. He admired their knack for “plumbing the dark and unsavoury depths of different characters, but somehow packaging it in a way that’s for some reason, you’re just enjoying watching it.”
That mixture of pop colour and the tide of darkness underneath became the mood board for Bunny’s world.
The series, Nick says, is a reminder of what television can still do: “You’re confronted, and you’re troubled, and you are upset, and you are outraged, and all of these sorts of things are what film should be doing.”
“I fucking love Brighton.”
Matt Smith
Brighton isn’t just a backdrop here. It’s a living presence, a trickster spirit, a throwback to a half-remembered seaside Britain. Edith senses that instinctively: “This kind of couldn’t be set anywhere except Brighton,” she says. “I think the place is a character.”
Matt grins at the memory of filming there. “I fucking love Brighton,” he admits. He talks about arriving on location and being surprised by how little is actually shot there.
For a city with those colours, that pier, those crooked streets and that slightly dangerous sense of pleasure-seeking, Brighton feels like a natural home for a story like Bunny Munro.
Even the car became part of the mythology. In the book it’s a small yellow Punto, a detail Matt initially fought to preserve. “Why isn’t it the car from the book?” he remembers asking. But Brighton’s sun-bleached eccentricities called for something looser, stranger and more exposed.
“It works really well having what my mum would call a cabriolet,” he says. A soft-top rolling along Marine Drive, a man’s life cracking open in the sea air.
Nick sees the city through a slightly different lens.
He remembers how Brighton has often been framed on screen: “It’s often filmed as a dark seedy, as a dark place… if you look at Brighton Rock.” What he loves about this adaptation is how it captures both the beauty and the rot, the fairytale and the crime scene. “It’s set in this sort of, in the past… a kind of nostalgic idea of something that’s lost, the old rotting seaside town and these sort of characters that might inhabit that.”
“What the fuck is this? This is amazing.”
Matt Smith
Matt recalls being 18, babysitting, when the first series of The Office came on. “I thought it was real,” he says. “What the fuck is this? This is amazing.” That unfiltered shock is something he still chases in roles, and Bunny Munro provides it in spades. It is a part layered with swagger, vulnerability, absurdity and pain.
Nick teases him affectionately when Matt says how surreal it felt to get an email with Nick’s name in the inbox. “I don’t feel that when I see that in my own book,” Nick deadpans. Matt fires back: “Yeah, but you wake up every day, as you said earlier, and you are Nick Cave.” Nick laughs. “It’s a burden.”
The chemistry between them mirrors the alchemy of the series itself. Chaos meets wit. Myth meets mundanity. A seaside dream turns sour at the edges.
“It’s such a beautiful thing. It’s a gift.”
Nick Cave
At its heart, The Death of Bunny Munro is a collision between old worlds and new, between the Brighton of memory and the Brighton of now. The West Pier burns. The streets feel haunted by people who might have stepped out of a postcard from 1978. Yet the show is never nostalgic for its own sake. It is restless and twitching, like the sea against the seawall.
Edith, who grew up in a small Scottish fishing village, recognises the undertow instantly. “I see a lot in that,” she says.
By the end of their conversation, all three seem energised by what they’ve made together: a story that refused to die has finally found its shape on the coast. A city often portrayed as either candyfloss or corruption reveals its more complicated truth and a character who should be irredeemable somehow becomes magnetic.
Nick sums it up with a simplicity that lingers: “To stumble on a TV series that just does that to you and keeps presenting you with unexpected challenges is just like, it’s such a beautiful thing. It’s a gift.”
Brighton, in all its faded grandeur, has rarely looked so alive.
