My conversation with Colin O’Sullivan, the mind behind Sunny, Apple TV+’s dark killer-robot dramedy, is initially, appropriately enough, marred by intrusive technology. Our conversation starts with a loud robot voice – Zoom’s audio recorder – saying “Recording in progress” and is then blighted temporarily by an air conditioner that sounds, according to O’Sullivan, like a jet engine taking off.
O’Sullivan is a Kerryman who lives in Aomori, in northern Japan, with his wife and two children. He has lived in the city for more than 20 years. We knew each other when we were students at Trinity College Dublin in the mid-1990s. We are speaking for the first time in more than two decades because O’Sullivan’s third novel, The Dark Manual, from 2018, is the source material for the aforementioned hit TV show starring Rashida Jones. This is a big deal.
O’Sullivan has published six books; three have come out since The Dark Manual. Several have been translated, published and well received in places such as France, Russia and Turkey. His first book, Killarney Blues, won the Prix Mystère de la Critique detective-fiction award in France. Yet in his home country relatively few people have heard of his work.
“You can’t blame them, really. I’m so far away,” he says with a laugh. “I’m not coming up to the literary events. I’m not doing a reading in Dublin or Galway. It’s not their fault. It’s my fault for being so far away ... I read novels by Kevin Barry and Sally Rooney ... But I’ve never met any of these people. I am the one in exile. I like being called an ‘Irish writer’, though. And I like that connection to the home. My first novel was Killarney-set, and it’s very Irish. There’s Gaelic-football scenes and everything ... but people at home don’t know who I am. It’s kind of funny.”
In 1999 O’Sullivan went to Japan to work as an English teacher for a year. Then he met Yuki, now his wife, who was working in the same school. “We started going out. And then we decided to travel around a bit. We moved to London for a couple of years. I worked as an English teacher ... We wanted to go back to Japan. So we moved to Hiroshima prefecture.” Later, when they were having children, they moved north to be closer to Yuki’s family. “It was just meant to be a year abroad. But, you know, 20 years later, here I am.”
O’Sullivan has written prolifically since he was a child. He describes it as a compulsion. Before he left Ireland he was a young Beckett-obsessed poet – “Beckett’s still behind me all the time when I’m writing” – and part of a writers’ group in Killarney. Over the following decade in Japan he published poetry and short stories in various journals and magazines. He even published a few longer works in that period but thinks of them as “mistake books”. “I regard my first published novel to be Killarney Blues, in 2013.”
That was the first of his six titles to appear from the Dublin-based Betimes Books, which was founded by the agent turned publisher Svetlana Pironko. Its ethos is resolutely independent and not for profit. And O’Sullivan, for his part, calls himself a “weekend writer”. He works Monday to Friday as an English teacher, but he is ridiculously prolific. As well as his published books he has four more completed and other projects under way.
How does he write so much? “A lot of it is boredom,” he says. “There’s not a lot of foreigners where I am up here. It’s loneliness to a degree. I became more serious about it. And I often joke about it with my family at home. If I was in Ireland I don’t think I could get half of the writing done. I’d be so distracted. I’d be watching the soccer, the hurling. I’d be in the pub. But because of the isolation and because of that exile, I got down to work and I wrote a lot in 10 years.”
Susie, the main character in Sunny/The Dark Manual, is a slightly alienated, linguistically challenged foreigner in Japan. (She’s American in the TV show, Irish in the book.) Is that autobiographical? O’Sullivan nods. “The difficulties with the language, the reluctance, or the hesitancy. It’s a difficult language ... I speak elementary Japanese – enough to get around and survive – but I don’t read and write well. So there’s a lot of me in Susie ... And then, of course, there’s the Irish drinking going on with Susie as well.”
Many of O’Sullivan’s novels start with an image. His most recent adult book, the gripping drama Marshmallows, began with an image he had of a well-to-do actor, waiting for his son and his son’s boyfriend to arrive for a tense Christmas dinner. The Dark Manual began with a nightmare. “I dreamed about this robot that I had programmed myself, that was trying to kill me ... I was looking everywhere for the instructions. And I woke up that morning and went down to breakfast with my wife and was, like, ‘I just had this mad dream: a robot was trying to kill me.’ And she said, ‘That would make a good science-fiction movie.’”
And he wrote it as a movie, years before Katie Robbins adapted it for Apple. (Yuki also convinced him to turn the stories he was telling their daughter about little-known fairy-tale characters into the children’s book The True Story of Binderella and other Secret Siblings.) In fact, all of O’Sullivan’s published novels have started as screenplays. He transforms them into novels later. The script “is the scaffolding, the skeleton”, he says. “The meat can be all the pretty words and the pretty sentences.”
He loves both books and cinema. “It’s all from a love of story,” he says. “Whether it be a Jim Jarmusch movie or a John Banville novel or a chat with a guy in the pub who’s just telling you about his divorce, it’s story. That’s what I’m interested in. And I think when I realised that, that I needed some kind of propulsive elements, the screenplay structure gave me that and I knew I could do my ‘fancy writing’ over that.”
O’Sullivan’s roots are literary, but he has never been afraid of genre fiction. Killarney Blues delves into noir. The Dark Manual is sci-fi. The Starved Lover Sings is dystopian fiction. Marshmallows is a revenge thriller. He likes to subvert expectation, he says, and genres come with an enjoyable set of expectations. “Mickey Spillane novels: you read it just waiting for the femme fatale ... What I like about the tropes is when people do something different with them. Kevin Barry’s new book [The Heart in Winter] is a western, but it’s not a western you’d expect.”
O’Sullivan’s genre experiments also features deft literary flourishes. The Dark Manual, for example, contains unlikely pieces of dreamlike nature writing on owls. “A kind of poetry,” he says. “Is it the Irish in us? We want to make things look and sound beautiful. One of my favourite living Irish writers is John Banville, where you can just hang on one of his paragraphs for a long time.”
There are no owls in the adaptation, he warns. “I’ve met a few readers since who are, like, ‘We’re watching Sunny and there’s no owls yet.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry, there aren’t going to be any owls.’”
Apple came to The Dark Manual because O’Sullivan’s publisher met a film and television agent who asked her for a look at the Betimes back catalogue. The agent liked O’Sullivan’s book and brought it to Robbins, previously a writer on shows such as Six Feet Under and The Affair, who was looking for a new project. After a few snags – Covid, the Hollywood writers’ strike – it became a huge Apple TV+ production. O’Sullivan was on set just once, in Tokyo, for a freezing night shoot. Dearbhla Walsh was directing. “It was great to hear an Irish voice say, ‘Colin, welcome! Sit behind me here and watch for the rest of the evening ...’ It was just fascinating.”
Was it easy to be hands-off? He laughs. “You’ve got to let your darlings go.”
The TV show, at least in its first episodes, follows the book’s main plot points, but it feels tonally quite different. “When they first showed interest in it as a TV show, my initial thoughts were, ‘This is going to be a Handmaid’s Tale kind of thing,’” O’Sullivan says. “It’s going to be dark and serious. And then they called me up and they were, like, ‘This is going to be a dark comedy.’ It was surprising. I’m really enjoying that aspect of it now.”
He has read only the first four scripts of the 10-episode series, so he’ll be watching along with the rest of us to see where it goes. The show has given him new opportunities. The Dark Manuel has been republished by Mariner Books (a branch of HarperCollins) with the title Sunny. “So The Dark Manual is no longer available. It’s Sunny now. It’s republished and rebranded to coincide with the TV series.” He laughs. “The cash-in, obviously.”
O’Sullivan is enjoying the success of the TV show. He says his teenage children, who are less interested in his books, are a bit more intrigued by the TV show. And fans of the show are discovering his other work for the first time, “novels that were maybe ignored for years ... But as regards my life, nothing changes. I’m still going to be a teacher, most probably, for the Monday-to-Friday gig. But as long as I can keep the writing up, that’s fine.”
The Sunny TV series is available on Apple TV+. The novel is published by Mariner Books
