Nick Cave has carved out a nice little side hustle composing film scores alongside his Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis, and he’s also written gritty dramas like The Proposition and Lawless. But in all of Nick Cave’s time in the movie industry, he hasn’t done a whole lot of acting, despite being a deeply compelling presence with a ton of gravitas. Most of Cave’s acting roles have been quick cameos: Freak Storm in Johnny Suede, the saloon singer in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Earlier this year, Cave played a forest in an interactive Shakespeare adaptation. And in a new film, Cave will play the legendary sci-fi author HG Wells.

The film in question is The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain, a biopic about an illustrator who became famous for his drawings of cats. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wain. Claire Foy plays his wife. The cast also includes Andrea Riseborough, Sharon Rooney, Toby Jones, Taika Waititi, and Richard Ayoade, and it’s got Cave somewhere in there as Wells.

You can catch a quick glimpse of Cave, who looks absolutely nothing like Wells, in the trailer for The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain. That trailer has a whole lot of cats in it, and it all looks very twee and psychedelic. The whole preview plays like a parody trailer for a fake movie, and it doesn’t seem like it could possibly be real, but apparently it is. Debuted at Telluride and everything.

In the next few months, Benedict Cumberbatch will also star in The Power Of The Dog and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Both of those movies look good! Presumably, nobody sat Nick Cave down and told him that Benedict Cumberbatch had three movies coming out late in 2021 and that he could pick a role in one of them. If that did happen, though, it appears that Nick Cave chose poorly. Watch the trailer below.

The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain opens in theaters 10/22, and it’ll be streaming on Amazon Prime 11/5.