Nick Cave wants Ray Winstone to play Bunny Munro on TV

Rock star, screenwriter and novelist Nick Cave has been speaking this weekend at the Dundee Literary Festival about his forthcoming television series.

Cave is working with film director John Hillcoat to bring his latest novel, The Death of Bunny Munro to the small screen. Cave hopes that Channel 4 will pick up the project and he has a good idea who he wants playing the lead character.

“Ray Winstone is dying to do it”. Cave revealed.

Winstone has previously worked with John Hillcoat on the film The Proposition, which was written by Cave, and he has been keen to play Bunny Munro since Cave began writing it as a screenplay before it eventually became a novel.

“Ray let himself go for that particular part,” Cave said of Winstone’s role in The Proposition.

“He was drinking and kind of out of shape and looking pretty rough, but he had this kind of magnetism about him where all the women involved were weak at the knees when Ray was around. And when he speaks everyone cranes towards him: he has this kind of pull which is really extraordinary. It’s something to do with his ability to be really funny, and the kind of vulnerability he has going on. It was really pleasing to see him get out of those wide-boy roles into something where he showed this amazing side he has as an actor. The idea was that we set him up as a hard guy and then bit by bit dismantled him to show that he’s a quivering wreck underneath it all.”

Cave also revealed that his other project with Hillcoat, a feature film adaptation of Mat Bondurant’s novel The Wettest Country In The World is still in the pipeline despite difficulties financing it.