The Death of Bunny Munro is a British dark comedy television miniseries that premiered on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 20 November 2025, consisting of six episodes adapted from Nick Cave’s 2009 novel of the same name, starring Matt Smith as the sex-addicted, alcoholic door-to-door cosmetics salesman Bunny Munro, directed in its entirety by Swedish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf, and produced by Clerkenwell Films (the BBC Studios-owned production company behind Baby Reindeer and The End of the F***ing World) in association with Sky Studios. The series had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 13 October 2025, where the first two episodes were screened to a strong critical response, and it arrived on Sky in the UK just over five weeks later with all six episodes available simultaneously.
In this comprehensive guide to The Death of Bunny Munro TV series, you will discover everything about it: the full story of how Nick Cave’s notorious 2009 novel finally became a television series (a journey of over 15 years that included a failed film attempt and Ray Winstone as an early attachment), the complete cast and their characters, episode guide and plot, the creative team including director Isabella Eklöf and writer Pete Jackson, the Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score, the Brighton and Sussex coast filming locations, the critical and audience response including the IMDB 6.7 rating and divided viewer reactions, the series’ exploration of toxic masculinity, grief, and generational trauma, where and how to watch it, and a comprehensive FAQ section answering every question about this extraordinary piece of British television.
From Novel to Screen: A 16-Year Journey
Nick Cave’s 2009 Novel
The Death of Bunny Munro was first published as a novel in September 2009, the second work of fiction by Nick Cave — the Australian musician best known as the lead vocalist of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, one of the most consistently acclaimed and intellectually serious artists in post-punk and alternative music. His first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989 and was an extreme, Gothic Southern Gothic work notable for its density and the near-impenetrable texture of its prose. The Death of Bunny Munro represented a very different kind of literary project: more readable, more immediate, more direct in its dark humour, and rooted in the specific geography of Brighton — the city on the south coast of England where Cave had lived for many years, and whose streets, pubs, and seaside character permeate every page.
The novel deals with Bunny Munro — a middle-aged door-to-door beauty product salesman, a habitual womaniser, an alcoholic, and a profoundly inadequate father — whose wife Libby commits suicide in the opening pages, leaving Bunny alone with their young son Bunny Junior. The action follows their increasingly chaotic road trip through Brighton and the Sussex coast as Bunny attempts to process his grief through compulsive selling and sexual conquest, Junior attempts to make sense of an incomprehensible world, and a mysterious serial killer dressed as the devil makes his way towards Brighton. The novel is set in 2003, around the time of the Great Storm that destroyed Brighton’s famous West Pier by fire — a specific piece of local history that Cave uses as a backdrop symbolising destruction and loss.
The novel received praise from writers including Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting), Neil LaBute, and David Peace, who provided back-cover endorsements. Welsh, whose own fiction occupies similar territory of addiction, masculinity, and social corrosion, described it as capturing something important about contemporary male dysfunction. Cave simultaneously produced the novel as an experimental audiobook featuring 3D audio effects, a soundtrack composed by himself and long-time collaborator Warren Ellis, and narration that created an immersive listening experience quite different from traditional audiobooks — a hint at the multimedia ambition that would eventually inform the television adaptation.
The Failed Film and Ray Winstone
What distinguishes the story of how The Death of Bunny Munro reached television is that it did not begin as a novel at all. Nick Cave originally conceived the project as a film script, developed in collaboration with director John Hillcoat — his long-time creative partner who directed the Cave-scripted films The Proposition (2005) and The Road (2009). Hillcoat researched the world of door-to-door salesmanship extensively for the project and provided Cave with a book on Butlin’s seaside resorts that contributed to the Brighton coastal setting that became so central to both the novel and the eventual TV series.
The film never got off the ground. Cave confirmed that Ray Winstone — one of Britain’s finest character actors, whose combination of physicality, charm, and darkness would have made him a compelling Bunny Munro — was attached to the project at one point and genuinely loved the character. But the film could not attract the financing and commitment needed to produce it, and Cave made the pivotal decision to transform the unrealised screenplay into a novel — making Bunny Munro one of the rare cases in modern fiction of a literary work that began its life as an unmade film.
Cave discussed the journey at the time of the television announcement: “I just sat down and worked on it. John [Hillcoat] sent me a lot of research on the world of the door-to-door salesman, which has largely disappeared from the world now, and a beautiful book on Butlin’s seaside resorts. These were the elements that went into the writing of this script. I just found the whole thing fascinating.” The 15-year gap between the novel’s publication in 2009 and the announcement of the television series in 2023 reflects both the difficulty of adapting such extreme and morally challenging material and the sustained belief of those who loved the book that it deserved a screen life.
The Production Story
Announcement and Development
In May 2023, Nick Cave revealed in a post on his Red Hand Files platform — his direct subscriber communication channel with fans — that an adaptation of the book was in active development. This news generated significant excitement among Cave’s devoted fanbase and among broader television audiences who had been aware of the novel’s reputation. The formal announcement came in November 2023, when Sky Studios confirmed the six-part series with Matt Smith attached to play the titular role. The announcement described the series as “produced by Clerkenwell Films in association with Sky Studios” — an immediately encouraging combination given Clerkenwell’s track record with literary adaptations and dark British drama.
The Clerkenwell Films involvement was immediately significant. The company, wholly owned by BBC Studios, had produced some of the most distinctive and critically admired British television dramas of recent years — most notably Baby Reindeer (2024), Richard Gadd’s extraordinary semi-autobiographical series about stalking and historical sexual abuse that became Netflix’s most-watched non-English language series and swept the BAFTA and Emmy awards. The company also produced The End of the F***ing World and Misfits — both series with the same combination of dark humour, moral complexity, and emotional depth that defines The Death of Bunny Munro. The pedigree of the production company was a genuine indicator of the series’ ambitions.
Matt Smith’s Attachment and Commitment
The casting of Matt Smith as Bunny Munro was the most important creative decision made during the production’s development. Smith — who had come to international prominence as the eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who (2010–2013), won acclaim for his portrayal of Prince Philip in The Crown, and appeared in major franchise film and television including House of the Dragon — brought both star power and genuine dramatic credibility to the role. His casting was announced simultaneously with the series itself, and his joint role as executive producer alongside Cave indicated the depth of his personal investment in the project.
Cave’s reaction to Smith’s casting in the official announcement captured the author’s characteristically direct and occasionally profane voice: “Finally, someone with the courage to take on this unholy tale. I am thrilled that Sky and Clerkenwell Films are bringing Bunny to life, in all his flawed glory, and I can think of nobody better than Matt Smith to play him.” Smith’s own statement described Cave’s novel as “a brilliant exploration of love, grief, and chaos. At its heart a deep, difficult, and tender story about a father and son, coping with loss and change.” The combination of Cave’s dark-comedy framing and Smith’s emphasis on the tender father-son relationship accurately captured the tonal duality that would define the finished series.
Director Isabella Eklöf, in an interview with Directors Notes published just before the series’ broadcast, described Smith’s performance in terms that placed it among his career best: “I think it’s the best thing he’s ever done because he’s allowed to explore all the aspects of this guy and be everywhere. He’s really got a thousand faces. He looks different in every light, and he’s always surprising you. He’s so fun to work with as a director because every take is different — editors hate him — I love him because you get something new every time.”
Filming Locations: Brighton and the Sussex Coast
Principal photography began in Spring 2024, spread across multiple locations along the south coast of England — the same geography that Nick Cave drew on for the novel and that had been his actual home for many years. The IMDB trivia for the series confirms: “Cave previously lived in Brighton & Hove on the south coast of England and the book takes place in several locations all along the south coast, including Brighton, Seaford, Newhaven, Worthing and Eastbourne. Filming has taken place in all of these locations.”
Brighton is the geographic and emotional heart of the series, as it is the novel — the city’s combination of faded Victorian grandeur, seaside melancholy, diverse energy, and the specific atmosphere of a place that exists simultaneously as a holiday destination and a struggling working-class community provides the perfect backdrop for a story about a man whose life is simultaneously all surface glitter and inner rot. The West Pier — the ghost of a Victorian structure destroyed by arson in 2003, its charred iron skeleton still standing in the English Channel at the time of filming — provides a visual metaphor for the novel’s themes of destruction and decay that would have been difficult to manufacture in a studio.
The series’ sunny, bright cinematography — a deliberate contrast to the darkness of its subject matter — uses the coastal settings to create the specific visual tone that director Isabella Eklöf was aiming for: “She brings a bright peppy energy to this potentially sordid tale, shooting southern England in summer sunshine, and allowing Bunny to undertake his road trip with his convertible roof down,” as the Loud and Clear Reviews critic described it. The idyllic visual surface of coastal England, contrasted with the corruption and dysfunction of the story happening within it, is one of the series’ most consistent and effective aesthetic choices.
Cast and Characters
Matt Smith as Bunny Munro
Matt Smith plays Bunny Munro — the series’ deeply flawed, charismatic, self-destructive central figure — across all six episodes. Bunny is a door-to-door cosmetics salesman for a company called Eternity Enterprises, a heavy drinker, a sex addict who sleeps with virtually every woman he encounters, and a father of spectacular inadequacy whose emotional stunting and self-absorption have contributed directly to the suicide of his wife Libby. He is also — and this is essential to the series’ moral complexity — genuinely loving towards his son in his limited and often damaging way, capable of real charm and human connection, and ultimately broken by forces whose origin the series traces carefully.
Smith’s performance was the subject of the series’ most intense critical and audience discussion. Empire’s review described him as “deranged, thoroughly unhinged” while praising the performance as “mesmerising.” IMDB user reviews ranged from enthusiastic (“Matt Smith is hypnotically chaotic”) to sceptical (“hugely miscast” for being insufficiently conventionally handsome to convincingly womanise). Director Eklöf’s characterisation of the performance as “the best thing he’s ever done” was echoed by multiple reviewers who noted his ability to make an intrinsically repellent character watchable and — at moments — genuinely sympathetic.
Rafael Mathé as Bunny Junior
Rafael Mathé plays Bunny Junior — Bunny’s nine-year-old son, the moral and emotional centre of the series — in a debut television performance that attracted some of the most enthusiastic critical responses of the entire production. Mathé was discovered through the specifically conducted search for a young actor to play the role — a search announced in the original production announcement with “the hope of uncovering an exciting new talent,” a hope that was comprehensively fulfilled.
Bunny Junior is described in the official series synopsis as a “nine-year-old conjunctivised walking trivia machine with a bowl cut” — a characterisation that captures both his physical appearance and the specific quality of his personality: intensely curious, quietly observant, and dealing with his mother’s suicide through a combination of denial and the magical realist device of continuing to communicate with her ghost throughout the series. His relationship with his father — simultaneously devoted and increasingly aware of how catastrophically inadequate Bunny is — forms the emotional spine of the story.
Reviewers were consistently effusive about Mathé: “The heart and soul of this show is the young Rafael Mathé (Bunny Jr), who is a complete revelation. I hope he has a long and successful career. The depth and subtlety of his performance makes the show bearable,” wrote one IMDB reviewer. Letterboxd users echoed this: “Rafael Mathé does some really impressive child acting too.” The Loud and Clear Reviews assessment — “Bunny Junior is the sweet centre of The Death of Bunny Munro, a remedy to his father’s amoral and increasingly desperate antics” — perhaps best captures the structural role the character and performance play in the series.
Sarah Greene as Libby
Sarah Greene — the Irish actor best known for her work in Normal People, Dublin Murders, and Bad Sisters — plays Libby Munro, Bunny’s wife whose suicide opens the series. The character is both dead from the first episode and continuously present throughout it: Libby appears as a ghost, interacting with both Junior and, as the series progresses and Bunny’s mental state deteriorates, with Bunny himself. The character becomes increasingly central to the series’ emotional architecture as it proceeds, her ghostly presence providing both the tenderness that the living characters struggle to express and the moral counterweight to Bunny’s destruction.
Greene’s performance across the series received particular praise for the quality of the “ghostly scenes” — Empire’s review specifically noted the “sweet, ghostly scenes between them and Sarah Greene as Bunny’s dead mother hurt to watch, bringing some much-needed tenderness, shot by director Isabella Eklöf with an ethereal warmth.” The dual nature of the role — appearing initially in flashback as a living person struggling with depression, then throughout the series as a gentle, sorrowful ghost — required Greene to register multiple emotional registers simultaneously, a challenge she met with significant skill.
Supporting Cast
Johann Myers as Poodle — Bunny’s best friend, described in official character notes as “foul-mouthed and at times grotesque,” a permanent fixture at the local pub, always ready for a party regardless of circumstances. Myers, whose credits include Without Sin and The Wheel of Time, plays Poodle as a figure of grotesque comedy whose loyalty to Bunny is both genuine and ultimately enabling of Bunny’s worst qualities.
Robert Glenister as Geoffrey — Bunny’s manager at Eternity Enterprises cosmetics company, who acts as much as a reluctant supervisor of Bunny’s personal chaos as a professional manager. Glenister, known for Sherwood and The Night Caller, brings authority and dark humour to a role that serves as a structural reminder of the ordinary world Bunny is gradually departing.
David Threlfall as Bunny Munro Senior — Bunny’s father, now 70 years old, who appears primarily in the fifth episode, titled Dead Man — one of the most critically praised individual episodes of the series. Threlfall, whose most famous role is the definitive portrayal of Frank Gallagher in the original UK Shameless, plays Bunny Senior as a bitter, blame-deflecting old man whose dysfunction has been directly transmitted to his son. Reviewers noted Threlfall as “brilliant in episode 5.”
Lindsay Duncan as Doris Pennington — Libby’s mother, who holds Bunny in complete contempt following her daughter’s death, having been aware of his infidelity and behaviour for years. Duncan, known for The Morning Show and A Discovery of Witches, brings cold, precise fury to the role — her scenes with Smith capturing the specific tension of a man who cannot defend himself against an entirely justified accusation.
Alice Feetham as Yvonne — One of the female characters Bunny encounters on the road trip, whose performance received specific individual commendation from IMDB reviewers: “One stood out, a very quiet, understated performance by Alice Feetham, whose totally convincing and luminous take of her otherwise template (‘tart with a heart’) part is outstanding.” Feetham is known for Boiling Point.
Elizabeth Berrington as Charlotte Parnovar — A further encounter on Bunny’s road trip, played by Berrington who is known for Last Night in Soho and various other British drama roles.
The Creative Team
Director: Isabella Eklöf
Isabella Eklöf is a Swedish filmmaker best known for her feature film Holiday (2018) — a controversial, formally rigorous feminist thriller about an abused woman who refuses to leave her violent partner, set against the beautiful backdrop of a Turkish resort. Holiday established Eklöf as a filmmaker of distinctive vision: willing to use beautiful surfaces to expose ugly realities, resistant to conventional moral resolution, and interested in the psychology of damaged people within suffocating relationships. Her television work before The Death of Bunny Munro included episodes of Industry, the HBO/BBC drama about young financial sector workers, where she demonstrated the ability to move fluidly between cinematic scope and the narrative demands of episodic television.
Her approach to The Death of Bunny Munro directly reflects the aesthetic sensibility demonstrated in Holiday: the decision to shoot the English seaside in summer sunshine, creating a visual world of warmth and colour that contains extraordinary dysfunction and violence, is the same visual strategy she used in Turkey for that film. In her Directors Notes interview, Eklöf articulated the thematic preoccupations driving her interpretation: the series is about “generational trauma, the cyclical impact of one generation on the next, and how someone acting in such a ghastly way can still be worthy of love, forgiveness and understanding.” Her comment that the series asks “what do you do about loving the narcissist?” is a precise thematic statement that aligns the project with her broader filmmaking interests.
Writer: Pete Jackson
Pete Jackson adapted Nick Cave’s novel into the six-episode screenplay — a credit that comes with unusual complexity given the novel’s nature. The Death of Bunny Munro is a deeply internal novel, largely told from inside Bunny’s deteriorating consciousness with a stream-of-consciousness quality that presents particular challenges to adaptation. Extracting an external narrative from interior monologue while maintaining the specific dark comedy tone of Cave’s prose required the kind of structural and tonal precision at which Jackson, known for BAFTA-winning drama Somewhere Boy, has proved adept.
Cave himself is credited on the series as both executive producer and — in Rotten Tomatoes’ credits — as a contributor to the screenplay alongside Jackson, which aligns with Cave’s own characterisation of the project’s creative process as involving close collaboration between himself and the production team from its earliest stages.
Music: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
The score for The Death of Bunny Munro was composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis — the musical partnership that has defined Cave’s film and television work since the early 2000s. Their collaboration on film scores including The Road (2009), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Hell or High Water (2016), and multiple other projects has established them as one of the most distinctive film music partnerships in contemporary cinema. Their aesthetic — which combines minimal string arrangements, electronic texture, blues-inflected guitar, and a capacity for both desolate atmosphere and unexpected moments of fragile beauty — fits the emotional and tonal range of The Death of Bunny Munro perfectly.
The Letterboxd user community specifically noted the music’s role in the series: “A sonic backdrop of indie gems and a score sculpted by Cave himself (alongside longtime collaborator Warren Ellis)” — and the specific use of “Always on My Mind” and the Cave-penned “Bright Horses” as needle drops in the final episodes generated particular emotional responses from viewers familiar with Cave’s back catalogue. The closing use of “Bright Horses” — from Cave’s 2019 album Ghosteen, written in the aftermath of the death of his son Arthur — carries a biographical weight that many Cave fans will have recognised, giving the series’ ending an additional layer of meaning for those who understand the emotional context in which the song was composed.
Story and Themes
Plot Overview
The six-episode series follows Bunny Munro (Matt Smith) from his wife Libby’s (Sarah Greene) suicide in the first episode through a darkening road trip across Sussex with his nine-year-old son Bunny Junior (Rafael Mathé). Following Libby’s funeral — at which Bunny commits what the Empire review describes as “at least two unspeakable things” before the journey begins — he flees from social services and sets off with Junior, continuing his work as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman while bouncing between sexual encounters and deepening alcoholic excess.
Running in parallel to Bunny’s road trip is the storyline of a serial killer dressed as the devil who is making his way towards Brighton — a strand that initially appears incongruous but which gradually intertwines with Bunny’s story as the series reaches its conclusion. This supernatural or quasi-supernatural strand reflects the novel’s engagement with magical realism, and the climactic convergence of the killer’s journey and Bunny’s own destruction forms the series’ conclusion. Bunny Junior, meanwhile, continues to communicate with the ghost of his mother throughout — a device that allows the series to maintain Libby’s presence while also tracking Junior’s grief and his dawning understanding of the scale of his father’s dysfunction.
The series’ episode structure as described by reviewers:
Episode 1: Libby’s suicide and funeral; introduction of Bunny’s world; the road trip begins Episode 2: Deepening of the father-son relationship as the road trip continues Episodes 3–4: Bunny’s behaviour escalates; encounters with various women; Junior’s observation of his father’s character Episode 5 (Dead Man): The visit to Bunny Senior (David Threlfall); the revelation of generational patterns Episode 6: Convergence with the serial killer narrative; the Faustian conclusion; “Bright Horses”
Themes: Masculinity, Grief, and Generational Trauma
The thematic architecture of The Death of Bunny Munro is more complex than its provocative surface might suggest. At its most immediate level, it is a study of toxic masculinity — the specific pathology of a man who has built his entire identity around sexual conquest, charm, and the suppression of any emotion that cannot be packaged as performance. Bunny’s sex addiction is not presented as titillating but as an obviously self-destructive pattern rooted in emotional avoidance: he cannot feel grief, cannot parent, cannot maintain honesty in any relationship because all of these things would require him to stop performing and start being.
But the series — particularly through the episode with Bunny Senior — contextualises this pathology within a generational framework. Bunny is not self-created; he has absorbed and reproduced the patterns of his own inadequate father, whose bitterness and blame-deflection mirror Bunny’s own characteristics at a later stage of the same dysfunction. The cycle of inadequate fatherhood is the series’ deepest structural concern, and Junior’s position within it — watching, absorbing, potentially reproducing — gives the story its specific urgency. Director Eklöf describes this as the series’ core question: “It looks at generational trauma, the cyclical impact of one generation on the next.”
The grief dimension — Libby’s suicide as the catalyst for everything that follows — sits somewhat paradoxically at the heart of a story about a man who cannot grieve. Bunny’s road trip is both a literal flight from grief and its consequences (social services, his mother-in-law’s contempt, the quiet accusation of his son’s love) and an unconscious enactment of grief’s dissolution of the self. His drinking and sexual compulsion escalate precisely because the pressure of unprocessed loss is building beneath his surface performance of normality. The series’ conclusion, whatever form it takes, represents the point at which the pressure can no longer be contained.
Critical Reception
Critical Response and Audience Scores
The Death of Bunny Munro received a mixed-to-positive critical response following its BFI London Film Festival premiere and Sky Atlantic broadcast. The IMDB score of 6.7/10 (from user ratings), while placing it in the solid-but-contested territory of shows that divide audiences strongly, reflects a genuine split between enthusiastic appreciation from viewers who engaged with its moral complexity and dark humour, and disappointment or rejection from those who found it too sordid or felt that Smith was miscast.
Rotten Tomatoes carries the series without a prominently featured critic score available at time of publication, though its listing confirms the November 2025 broadcast and the full cast and crew details. The critical writing available — from Empire, Loud and Clear Reviews, the BFI premiere response, and the Directors Notes interview — suggests that professional critics engaged seriously with the series and generally praised it as a distinctive piece of British television, with Matt Smith’s performance receiving consistent commendation.
Empire’s review described it as “a Faustian descent into the cyclical horrors of broken fatherhood that’s as mesmerising and unpredictable to watch as it is hard to bear. If you can stomach it, Matt Smith’s deranged, thoroughly unhinged performance will take you to hell and back.” This phrase — “if you can stomach it” — appears with notable frequency in positive responses to the series and reflects the genuine challenge the material presents to audiences unused to unredeemed moral complexity in their television drama.
The Casting Controversy
The most persistent negative thread in audience responses — particularly on IMDB, where the “featured review” criticising Smith’s casting generated a notable counter-reaction from his defenders — centred on whether Smith was physically suited to play a character whose principal characteristic is the ability to seduce an improbably large number of women. The criticism, as summarised by one frustrated IMDB user, was that “they’re basically complaining that Matt Smith isn’t ‘hot enough,’ which is absurd.”
The criticism reflects a genuine tension in the source material: Cave’s Bunny Munro is described as conventionally handsome, and his serial seduction of women relies in part on conventional physical attractiveness. Director Eklöf acknowledged this dimension directly in interview: “The titular Bunny Munro is a poster boy for toxic masculinity, misogyny, and parental abandonment. It has to be said. Well, he’s good-looking. He’s very good-looking and a charming chap, absolutely.” Her casting of Smith — whose looks are distinctive rather than conventionally attractive — was clearly a deliberate choice prioritising psychological complexity and performance range over superficial physical matching of the character description.
Practical Information: How to Watch
Streaming and Broadcast Details
The Death of Bunny Munro is a Sky Original, which means it is exclusively available in the UK on Sky Atlantic and the streaming service NOW. All six episodes were made available simultaneously from the premiere date of 20 November 2025 — meaning the entire series can be binged in a single sitting (the total runtime is approximately three and a half hours across six episodes, making it one of the more time-efficient complete series watches in recent British television).
Sky Atlantic: Available to all Sky TV subscribers with Sky Atlantic included in their package. Check sky.com for current subscription packages and pricing — Sky TV packages typically begin from approximately £26/month for basic packages and increase with additional channels.
NOW (formerly NOW TV): The streaming service formerly known as NOW TV, operated by Sky, provides access to Sky Atlantic content without a satellite dish or Sky Q box. NOW offers Sky Atlantic content through its Entertainment Membership, which as of 2025 was priced at approximately £9.99/month (standard) with the option of a boost upgrade for additional features. A seven-day free trial was available to new subscribers — check nowtv.com for current pricing and availability.
Availability outside the UK: NBCUniversal Global Distribution handles international sales on behalf of Sky Studios. The series has been sold to international broadcasters in multiple territories. In Australia, it has been made available on Foxtel (confirmed by IMDB user references to “Streaming on Foxtel”). US availability had not been confirmed at the time of the UK broadcast, but international distribution via NBCUniversal means US availability through one of the company’s platforms is likely. Viewers outside the UK and Australia should check local streaming services for availability.
Age rating: The Death of Bunny Munro has been certified 15 by the BBFC, meaning it is considered unsuitable for audiences under 15. The certification reflects the series’ content including strong sexual scenes, heavy alcohol use, scenes of child neglect, strong language throughout, and elements of violence. The series is not available to under-15 audiences on regulated UK streaming platforms.
What to Expect
The Death of Bunny Munro is not a comfortable watch. Viewers expecting conventional dramatic pleasures — a sympathetic protagonist, moral resolution, emotional safety — will find themselves challenged and possibly alienated by a series that commits to the uncomfortable logic of its source material without apology. The central character is, by design, repellent in ways that are immediate and specific: his behaviour at his wife’s funeral in the first episode; his neglect of his son throughout; his relationships with women; his relentless self-deception.
What the series offers in return for the discomfort is something rarer: a sustained, serious examination of how men who have never learned to be human reproduce their dysfunction in the next generation, and a child’s love for a parent that is unearned and unconditional and therefore all the more heartbreaking to witness. The magical realism elements — Libby’s ghost, the devil-costumed serial killer — give the series a quality of heightened reality that distances it from conventional social realism and aligns it with the specific tradition of dark British fiction from which Cave’s novel emerges.
For fans of Nick Cave’s music and its characteristic preoccupations — love, death, sin, violence, beauty, the south coast of England — the series will feel like an extended engagement with the world of his later work, particularly the Ghosteen and Skeleton Tree albums that deal with grief, loss, and the fragility of human love. The score’s use of Cave’s own songs, including “Bright Horses,” creates moments of extraordinary emotional depth for those who know the biographical context.
The Nick Cave Connection
Cave’s Personal Relationship with the Material
The biographical connection between Nick Cave and the material is significant and has become more resonant since the novel was published in 2009. Cave has experienced profound personal loss in the years between publication and the series’ broadcast: his son Arthur Cave died in 2015 at the age of fifteen after falling from a cliff near their Brighton home, and the grief from this loss profoundly shaped Cave’s subsequent music — most directly the albums Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019), the latter written explicitly in the aftermath of Arthur’s death.
The Death of Bunny Munro, written before these losses, deals with a father’s relationship to his son through the prism of the father’s inadequacy and moral dissolution. In the context of Cave’s subsequent biography, the novel’s preoccupation with fatherhood, with what a son absorbs from his father, and with the shadow that a man’s failures cast over a child’s life, acquires additional biographical weight that the television adaptation — with Cave as executive producer and the score drawing on his post-bereavement musical language — could not but reflect.
Cave’s comment about the novel’s conception — the long journey from film script to book, the early attachment of Ray Winstone, the decision to write the story after the film could not be made — positions Bunny Munro as a character he has lived with for over two decades: a figure whose appeal he understands precisely and whose “flawed glory,” as he described it in welcoming Matt Smith to the role, reflects something genuine and difficult about certain kinds of men.
Warren Ellis and the Score
Warren Ellis has been Cave’s primary musical collaborator since the early 1990s, when he joined Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a multi-instrumentalist. Their specific collaboration as composers of film and television music began with The Proposition in 2005 and has produced a body of work that is consistently considered among the finest film music of the contemporary period. Their scores typically combine Ellis’s layered violin and viola work with Cave’s piano and guitar, electronic texture, and — in the studio work — a production approach that preserves the organic, human quality of the performances rather than polishing them into generic score-neutral product.
For The Death of Bunny Munro, the score functions both as atmospheric soundtrack to the visuals and as a direct carrier of the thematic material — Cave’s own relationship to loss, fatherhood, and the coast of Sussex running through the music in ways that are both subliminal and, for attentive listeners, extremely legible.
Nick Cave’s Literary Career: Context for the Series
And the Ass Saw the Angel: The First Novel
To fully appreciate what The Death of Bunny Munro represents as a literary and now television project, it is worth understanding the context of Nick Cave’s fiction career. His first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989 at the height of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ critical ascendancy — the same year that the seminal album The Good Son was recorded — and it was an extraordinarily ambitious debut of maximalist prose. Set in a fictional rural American south — despite Cave being Australian — and structured around the first-person narration of a mute boy named Euchrid Eucrow, the novel was dense, hallucinatory, and deliberately difficult, more a sustained prose-poem than a conventional novel. It established Cave’s literary voice as Gothic, extreme, and wholly uninterested in the conventions of accessible commercial fiction.
The Death of Bunny Munro represents a deliberate departure from that approach. Where And the Ass Saw the Angel was set in an imagined American Gothic landscape, Bunny Munro is set in the specific geography of Cave’s own home city — the real streets, pubs, and seafront of Brighton in 2003. Where the first novel was almost unparseable in its stylistic extremity, the second is readable, propulsive, even funny in its dark way. The 20-year gap between the two novels reflects both Cave’s sustained investment in his primary career as a musician and his willingness to take considerable time before feeling he had something to say in fiction again that justified the effort.
Cave’s Influence on British Dark Drama
The Death of Bunny Munro TV series arrives in the context of a particularly rich period for British dark drama on premium cable and streaming platforms. Baby Reindeer (also produced by Clerkenwell Films), Adolescence, Black Mirror, and numerous other series have demonstrated that British audiences and international streaming subscribers have genuine appetite for dramatically extreme, morally complex material that challenges conventions of sympathetic characterisation and comforting resolution. The Death of Bunny Munro fits naturally into this tradition — darker than most, set in a specific and recognisable British geography, driven by character study rather than plot mechanics, and scored by one of British music’s most distinctive artistic voices.
Cave’s influence on dark British culture extends well beyond music. His films (The Proposition, The Road, Lawless as scripts; Bad Seed as a presence in the cultural landscape), his Red Hand Files correspondence, his collaboration with Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard on the 20,000 Days on Earth film, and his novel both contribute to a body of work that spans creative forms in a way that makes the television adaptation of his second novel feel like a natural extension of his artistic project rather than a commercial licence deal.
Comparisons: Similar Series
The End of the F***ing World
The most direct comparator for The Death of Bunny Munro in the Clerkenwell Films catalogue is The End of the F***ing World (Netflix, 2017–2019), the darkly comic series adapted from Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, which follows two damaged teenagers on a road trip across England. Both series share the Clerkenwell production heritage, the road trip structure, the juxtaposition of English landscape with extreme and often violent human behaviour, and the use of dark comedy to approach material that straight drama would make unbearable. Both series also use the specific atmosphere of the English provinces — the motorway service stations, the B&B hotels, the provincial diners — as a backdrop for stories about people in various stages of psychological and social dissolution.
The critical difference is age and gender: The End of the F***ing World follows a female lead whose perspective provides a moral anchor even as the narrative descends into violence, while The Death of Bunny Munro keeps its perspective firmly inside the male lead whose worldview is the problem the series is diagnosing. This makes Bunny Munro a considerably more challenging watch for audiences accustomed to having a character through whom to understand and judge the action.
Baby Reindeer
Baby Reindeer (Netflix, 2024) is the most obvious recent Clerkenwell Films comparison. Like The Death of Bunny Munro, it is a semi-autobiographical or source-novel adaptation dealing with extreme subject matter (stalking, sexual assault) through a combination of dark comedy and devastating emotional realism. Like Bunny Munro, it features a male lead whose character is morally complex and who is presented neither as straightforwardly heroic nor as simply villainous. And like Bunny Munro, it was produced by Clerkenwell Films with a commitment to not softening or resolving the material for audience comfort.
The primary difference is reception: Baby Reindeer became a global cultural phenomenon, winning multiple BAFTAs and Emmys and generating extensive media debate. The Death of Bunny Munro premiered to a much more modest initial reception — partly because its material is genuinely more extreme, partly because its subject is a man rather than a sympathetic male victim, and partly because it was a Sky Original rather than a Netflix commission and therefore had a smaller initial global audience at launch. Whether it will acquire the kind of word-of-mouth reputation that Baby Reindeer eventually generated is a matter for time to determine.
The Brighton Setting: Then and Now
Brighton in the Novel and Series
Nick Cave lived in Brighton for many years — the city’s specific character, its combination of bohemian culture, seaside kitsch, faded grandeur, and social diversity providing the texture of both his personal life and his creative work during those years. The Brighton of the novel is the city of 2003, specifically around the time of the West Pier fire — a Victorian structure that had stood derelict in the sea off the promenade since 1975 and was destroyed by arson in March and May 2003, leaving the skeletal steel frame that still stands today as one of the most evocative architectural ruins in England.
The novel uses the pier fire as a specific backdrop — Bunny is aware of the fire, and the destruction of the pier operates as a metaphor for the city’s own relationship with decay, with beauty turning to ruin, and with the impossibility of preserving what has been destroyed. The television series, filming in 2024 in a Brighton where the pier’s skeleton is a landmark attraction in its own right (the restored West Pier Trust and the adjacent i360 observation tower now defining that section of the seafront), inherits this specific relationship between the story and the geography.
For visitors interested in the series’ filming locations, the key Brighton landmarks in the story include the Brighton seafront and promenade, the Palace Pier (the functioning pier at the eastern end of the seafront), Kemp Town and the streets of central Brighton, and the coastal road running east through Seaford and Newhaven towards Eastbourne — the route of the road trip that takes Bunny and Junior through the smaller, less glamorous Sussex coastal towns that contrast with Brighton’s cultural confidence.
FAQs
What is The Death of Bunny Munro TV series?
The Death of Bunny Munro is a six-part British dark comedy television miniseries that premiered on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 20 November 2025. It is adapted from Nick Cave’s 2009 novel of the same name, stars Matt Smith as the sex-addicted door-to-door cosmetics salesman Bunny Munro, and was directed entirely by Isabella Eklöf. Produced by Clerkenwell Films (Baby Reindeer, The End of the F***ing World) in association with Sky Studios, it follows Bunny and his young son Bunny Junior (Rafael Mathé) on a road trip across Sussex following the suicide of Bunny’s wife Libby (Sarah Greene), as a serial killer dressed as the devil makes his way towards Brighton.
Who plays Bunny Munro in the TV series?
Matt Smith plays Bunny Munro in the 2025 television series. Smith is best known for playing the eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who (2010–2013), Prince Philip in The Crown, and Daemon Targaryen in House of the Dragon. He is also an executive producer of the series alongside Nick Cave. Smith described the role as “a brilliant exploration of love, grief, and chaos” and director Isabella Eklöf called his performance “the best thing he’s ever done.”
Where can I watch The Death of Bunny Munro?
The Death of Bunny Munro is a Sky Original available exclusively in the UK on Sky Atlantic (for Sky subscribers) and the NOW streaming service (formerly NOW TV, available as part of the Entertainment Membership at approximately £9.99/month as of 2025). All six episodes were released simultaneously on 20 November 2025. In Australia it is available on Foxtel. International distribution is handled by NBCUniversal Global Distribution. The series is not on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Disney+.
Is the TV series based on a book?
Yes. The Death of Bunny Munro TV series is adapted from Nick Cave’s 2009 novel of the same name — Cave’s second novel after And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). The novel was itself originally conceived as a film script, developed by Cave in collaboration with director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road), with Ray Winstone once attached as the potential lead. When the film could not be made, Cave converted the screenplay into a novel. The television adaptation was written by BAFTA-winning writer Pete Jackson (Somewhere Boy), with Cave serving as executive producer.
How many episodes is The Death of Bunny Munro?
The Death of Bunny Munro is a six-episode miniseries. All six episodes were released simultaneously on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 20 November 2025. The total runtime across the six episodes is approximately three and a half hours — making the complete series watchable in a single sitting for those who wish to binge it in one go. The fifth episode is titled Dead Man and features David Threlfall as Bunny Senior; it was among the most individually praised episodes by reviewers.
Is Nick Cave involved in the TV series?
Yes. Nick Cave is an executive producer of the television series and co-wrote the score alongside his long-time musical collaborator Warren Ellis. Cave also contributed to the screenplay alongside writer Pete Jackson (with both credited on Rotten Tomatoes). He has been publicly enthusiastic about the adaptation, describing Matt Smith as the ideal person to bring Bunny to life “in all his flawed glory.” Nick Cave’s “Bright Horses” — from the Ghosteen album (2019) — is used in the final episode to significant emotional effect.
Who directed The Death of Bunny Munro?
The Death of Bunny Munro TV series was directed entirely by Isabella Eklöf, a Swedish filmmaker best known for her feature film Holiday (2018) and for directing episodes of the HBO/BBC drama Industry. Eklöf is also an executive producer of the series. Her visual approach — shooting the Sussex coast in summer sunshine to create a beautiful surface beneath which profound dysfunction operates — was widely praised by reviewers as one of the series’ most distinctive qualities.
What age rating is The Death of Bunny Munro?
The Death of Bunny Munro has been certified 15 by the BBFC, meaning it is considered unsuitable for viewers under 15 years of age. The rating reflects the series’ content including strong sexual scenes, heavy alcohol use, child neglect, strong language throughout, and elements of violence. Sky’s own description confirms: “The Death of Bunny Munro has been certified 15 – meaning the series is considered unsuitable for younger audiences.”
What is the IMDB rating for Death of Bunny Munro?
The Death of Bunny Munro has an IMDB score of 6.7/10 from user ratings. This score reflects genuinely divided audience responses: enthusiastic reviewers who found it a compelling and distinctive piece of dark British television with an extraordinary central performance, versus sceptical viewers who found the subject matter too sordid or Matt Smith’s casting misaligned with their expectations of the character. Reviews explicitly praising the series as one of the best of 2025 sit alongside critical assessments finding it bleak and alienating. The Director Notes interview with Isabella Eklöf noted that the series is “not for everyone” by design.
What is the production company behind the series?
The Death of Bunny Munro is produced by Clerkenwell Films in association with Sky Studios. Clerkenwell Films is wholly owned by BBC Studios and is the production company behind Baby Reindeer (2024 Netflix), The End of the F***ing World, and Misfits — a track record of distinctive, literary dark British drama that positioned them as the natural home for an adaptation of Cave’s novel. Executive producers include Petra Fried, Ed Macdonald, and Emily Harrison for Clerkenwell Films, and Manpreet Dosanjh for Sky Studios, alongside Matt Smith, Nick Cave, Pete Jackson, and Isabella Eklöf.
Where was The Death of Bunny Munro filmed?
The Death of Bunny Munro was filmed across multiple locations along the south coast of England, primarily in and around Brighton and the East Sussex coast. Specific filming locations confirmed by IMDB include Brighton, Seaford, Newhaven, Worthing, and Eastbourne — all locations that appear in Nick Cave’s source novel, which drew on Cave’s years of residence in Brighton. The visual contrast between the sunny, picturesque coastal landscape and the dark subject matter was a deliberate artistic choice by director Isabella Eklöf.
Why The Death of Bunny Munro Matters
An Unfashionable Moral Vision
In the landscape of 2025 British television, The Death of Bunny Munro occupies a distinctive and deliberately uncomfortable position. At a moment when much prestige drama seeks to place morally clear protagonists at the centre of narratives where the audience’s empathy is directed by design, Cave and Eklöf have made a series whose protagonist is, on any conventional assessment, a bad man. Bunny Munro is not redeemed in the series in any conventional dramatic sense, and the series does not ask its audience to forgive him — it asks them to understand him, which is a much more demanding request.
This moral ambition — the willingness to ask audiences to sustain attention on a character they cannot comfortably like while simultaneously asking them to understand how that character came to be the way he is, and to care about the child being damaged by him — is what separates The Death of Bunny Munro from more conventional dark drama. It is not a cautionary tale with a clear moral, and it is not a rehabilitation narrative where the antihero finds redemption. It is an honest portrait of a specific kind of male dysfunction and its consequences, made with enough formal skill and emotional intelligence to resist both exploitation and sentimentality.
Director Eklöf’s articulation of the series’ purpose — to show “that humans are complex, and you can definitely condemn someone for their actions while loving them” — is as good a statement of the artistic case for the series as any. In an era of easy moral categorisation, the insistence on complexity is itself a meaningful artistic choice. The Death of Bunny Munro is not easy television; it is, when it works, important television — the kind that stays with viewers precisely because it refuses to let them off the hook of their own emotional responses.
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