The “rubbish” 2018 movie Matt Smith wants to delete from history: “You’ve got to crack on with it”
When Far Out spoke to the coveted filmmaker and director of The Death of Bunny Munr, Isabella Eklöf, she painted Matt Smith out to be a God.
There was nothing that Smith could do wrong, from Eklöfs expert opinion, at least. The director shared that Smith was “A dream, a beautiful, intelligent, fun, hard-working actor, so, so invested in the project […] he’s been amazing”.
Across the fancy table in the fancy hotel room, she revealed herself to be a huge fan of Smith’s practice, personality, and persona. But, something sneaky in one of her responses pointed a jabbing figure back through Smith’s filmography: “I think he is really excited to be allowed something more complex to bite down on”.
A compliment, no doubt, almost hiding the fact that Smith’s past is filled with a handful of silly, trivial pursuits in the name of paying your bills as an artist. In all fairness, the Caught Stealing star has said as much himself, much more candidly than Eklöf’s veiled confession.
“I don’t believe in regrets: You’ve got to crack on with it,” Smith admitted to the talk show host of Capital FM when asked to confess to any career regrets. However, he quickly added, “But there was one film I did called Patient Zero, which I call ‘Patient Career Low'”. The British actor went on with a laugh, “I’ve never seen it. They wanted to make it like zombies that listen to music, and it’s like… I mean, you know the time that you’re making something and you’re like, ‘This is going to be rubbish’? Yeah, that.”
Smith couldn’t have summed it up better if he’d tried, which courts an 11% on Rotten Tomatoes, despite Smith and the great Stanley Tucci’s involvement in the affair. This, of course, translated into extremely poor box office performance, with the film making around $138,000 against an estimated production budget of around $10million. Forget the zombies, turns out the team behind it had maggots for brains.
Despite the announcement in 2014 that Smith and Natalie Dormer would join the cast, the film couldn’t ever get itself off the ground in the first place, delayed for two years after Screen Gems quickly realised the project would almost certainly be a missfire, essentially delaying their own D-day due to poor test screenings, but they couldn’t outrun the bad energy forever.
The premise isn’t too shabby for a zombie film, which sees Smith’s character, Morgan, be bitten but remaining human with the ability to communicate with the infected, so he begins his search for the antidote to the highly contagious virus, and with Stefan Ruzowitzky in the directorial chair, whose 2007 historical drama, The Counterfeiters, was an Academy Award-winner, it seemed the crew might just be able to pull it off.
Regardless, Patient Zero was overflowing with aggravating plot devices, a chalky script, half-there characters, strange tensions, and a cringeworthy reliance on confusing science. Smith’s certainly done much better, who, at the time, was shooting The Crown, a series he was involved in between 2016 and 2023. You’d do much better to give that a whirl and save yourself from all this zombie tomfoolery.
