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- Director Isabella Eklöf describes shooting a wild funeral scene with Matt Smith in ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’
- The series explores dark themes with a focus on morality, based on Nick Cave’s novel
- Matt Smith embraces the challenge of playing a deeply flawed and appalling character
‘We just went into the bathroom and watched him masturbate.’
Matt Smith’s vile new drama, The Death of Bunny Munro, has proven a shocking watch for viewers since its launch on Sky.
The six-part series is packed with jaw-dropping moments, and the director of the captivating drama spoke to Metro about what it was like filming the wildest and most emotional scenes.
Based on the 2009 novel by Nick Cave, the drama holds nothing back in its portrayal of just how repulsive our titular Bunny truly is, motivated purely by a lust-filled haze.
In the show, the travelling salesman takes his young son, Bunny Jr, under his wing when his mum, Libby (Sarah Greene), dies by suicide.
Her funeral is just one opportunity for the narrative to show us just how perverse the deadbeat dad has become as he escapes to the church loos to masturbate while the service takes place.
It’s a deeply disturbing sequence, but when it came to the actual filming of it, it was a lot more fun than it appears on screen, as director Isabella Eklöf told Metro at the London premiere of the TV show.
The Swedish showrunner said: ‘There were some scenes that were difficult and very emotionally charged, but that wasn’t one of them.
‘That was a really fun scene to shoot. We shot it on the second-to-last day, and, by that time, we knew each other so well, so we just went into the bathroom and watched him masturbate. Easy and fun.’
As for the scenes that truly packed an emotional punch, many of those took place between the father and son as they attempted to forge a connection despite everything working against them.
What does Metro think of The Death of Bunny Munro?
Senior TV Reporter Asyia Iftikhar shares her 4.5-star review:
Bunny’s cockiness is cringe-inducing as he navigates the world stuck in the mindset of a scammy businessman from the 80s who smells of cigars and two-day-old sex, and who definitely hasn’t seen a shower in at least a week.
As we watch him destroy his own life, any hope of a healthy relationship with women, and a meaningful connection with his son, there’s a stark commentary on the awful consequences of generational trauma and how society fails lost men, which also causes women to suffer at their hands as a result.
In this show, sex is not intimate and meaningful; it is a callous transaction. Compliments are paid as a means to an end, and Bunny Munro is not interested in living; simply surviving.
Discussing her approach to creating TV magic, Isabella explained: ‘[After discussing the material with them] I take a step back and let them do their thing. Rafa and Matt have wonderful chemistry.
‘They were both very impressed with each other, and they almost wanted to impress each other, so that was a thing that I tried not to meddle in too much.’
Describing the novel as a ‘wonderful, passionate book about how bad things can go if left unchecked’, Isabella discussed the urgent need for a ‘deeply moral story’ on screen.
‘[On TV] there’s been too much irony, what ifs, grey areas and, yes, it is all grey areas, but also there is right and wrong, there is good and evil, and we need to address it,’ she said.
Ultimately, while trying to sell the show, the way Bunny pawns off beauty products to unsuspecting women, Isabella called the series ‘a trip [that] ends with the devil’.
Elsewhere, the House of the Dragon star had opened up about how, despite his character being utterly ‘appalling’, he relished the challenge to delve into such a tortured mind.
The Death of Bunny Munro is available to watch on Sky and NOW.
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