Interviews
How Bryan Fuller’s ‘Dust Bunny’ Evolved From An ‘Amazing Stories’ Episode [Interview]
It’s not the ravenous monster under the bed that steals Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny, but young lead Sophie Sloan as the adorably precocious 10-year-old Aurora.
In Dust Bunny, releasing in theaters on December 12, Aurora enlists her mysterious neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) to dispatch the creature that she asserts ate her parents. That her neighbor happens to be a hit man complicates things in this charming gateway horror adventure.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Fuller about his feature directorial debut after the film’s TIFF premiere about its conception and creation, including the practical puppetry and creature design behind his monster. For the filmmaker, nailing Aurora as a character was far more crucial.
Dust Bunny originated conceptually as an episode of Amazing Stories, Apple TV+’s anthology series executive produced by Steven Spielberg, but Fuller pivoted when that didn’t work out. “I was working on the story with a wonderful writer named David Graziano, whom I worked with on American Gods. We were working on this story for Amazing Stories, and it didn’t make it through the process. I was like, ‘I want to do something very specific with this.’ That was kind of the impetus for the big emotional component of Aurora’s life. Because every time I write a character, I have to chip off a Horcrux and put it in the character. So it’s a bit of a barometer, so I understand how they’re going to behave.
“There was a pretty big chip, there was a Nagani-sized chip in Aurora for my experience growing up. Which was, I think, when you grow up in a tricky home, and then you realize that it’s a different home than your friends, and then you get out into sort of semi-adult life, and you’re like, ‘Oh wow, this is really a different home than how things are supposed to be.’ Or usually that was the element of who Aurora is, how I’m Aurora. And how anybody who’s had a tricky childhood, hopefully, will see how they’re Aurora. So it was about giving the audience enough of Aurora so they could still see themselves in Aurora.”
Writing the character is step one, but finding the young actor to fill Aurora’s shoes would be a whole other process.
“I mean, it was easy for me because I had a fantastic casting director named Margery Simkin, who found her and went through a ton of folks to get her,” Fuller cracks. “I think there were 4,000 auditions that they had. There was a crazy amount of submissions, then a less crazy amount of auditions that were still in the hundreds, if not thousands. Then those got whittled down to 12 that I saw. [Simkin] has cast all the Avatar movies and has been around for a second and has worked with Sigourney [Weaver] multiple times. She also helped facilitate that happening. But Sophie really was Margery’s discovery. And she’s a Scottish actress, she’s a little Scottish girl.”
While Sloan’s audition process impressed, her accent was at odds with the film’s New York setting. If Fuller needed convincing to cast Sloan as Aurora, his leading man and frequent collaborator Mads Mikkelsen made it clear that Sloan was his choice as scene partner.
Fuller explains, “It was like with Mads and her heavy accents, and we’re supposed to be in New York, nobody’s going to buy this. They told her, ‘The director loves you, but your accent is very thick, and we can’t set it in Scotland.’ Mads was campaigning once we narrowed it down to three actors. Mads is my partner, and I was like, ‘Here are the final three.’ He said, ‘Just do it with that girl, but just set it in Scotland. Just change the setting because she’s so good.'”
Mikkelsen was right, and, as Fuller tells us, Sophie Sloan is the film’s not-so-secret weapon. The filmmaker also cites acting coach Lena Cruz as a vital component in Sloan’s affecting performance.
Prepare to fall head over heels for Aurora when Dust Bunny hits theaters this week.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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