Audible Teases Jonathan Bailey’s ”Seductive” Performance In ‘Dracula’ At Venice Preview Of Ambitious Multilingual Adaptation

Audible set down at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend with a preview of its ambitious adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror classic Dracula. The platform’s biggest audio production to date, the adaptation is being rolled out in seven different languages, with each of the versions featuring their own local A-list star cast and director, while taking their cue from the English-language version directed by Mary Lambert. The Venice presentation featured a short preview of the English-language version, giving a taste of Jonathan Bailey as Dracula, Ella Purnell as the vampire’s object of desire Mina, as well as this year’s Venice jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal in the central connecting role of Professor Van Helsing. Watch on Deadline Aurelie de Troyer, Head of Audible Content, said Robyn Ahern’s adaptation delivered “a fresh take” on the classic novel which has inspired thousands of films, dramas and plays and other content spin-offs over the past near 130 years. “Whenever we commission something, we’re always thinking about what next, where do we go, and the question we ask ourselves is are we going to add value,” she said. “Robyn’s vision right from the beginning was really to give a lot of agency to Mina. The psychological duel between Dracula and Mina really drives the story… ultimately, she’s the hero of the story.” De Troyer said Venice was the perfect location to preview the drama, even if the festival is devoted to storytelling through the moving image. “Why Venice? We feel it makes perfect sense… we are absolutely dedicated to bringing cinematic production values to all our productions… I feel that Audible has really led the way for a long time in that space and I think people are starting to notice,” she said. “I was sent yesterday an article from the Daily Telegraph, the British newspaper, about audiobooks,” she continued. “The fact that there was a story about audiobooks was great in itself, but it also mentioned, and I quote, that audiobooks are getting a Hollywood makeover… and we thought it is exactly that. We are bringing huge production values and that’s why we want to work with the best directors, world class performers and the best sound design, working with the best people in their field… So why not come to the home of cinema to celebrate this?” Lambert, who is known for the cult horror classic adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, makes her audio directorial debut on the production. She admitted the project had taken her out of her comfort zone but said it was totally within her grasp thanks to her life-long love of literature. “It was a challenge because I’m a very visual person, but I’ve always lived in books since I learned to read at five-years-old. The written word has always been extremely important to me,” she said, revealing she had read Dracula “five or six times all the way through”. She suggested that Stoker’s tale still tapped into the zeitgeist, even though more than a century had passed since it was first published. “It’s a really important story and it’s really important for our time. There’s a reason why people are still interested,” she said. “Bram Stoker wrote this book in 1897 and basically, he invented the modern Dracula, the modern vampire. Vampires still live in our society, they live in our media, they’re part of our lives, honestly. It’s not declining. It’s not going away. “Every time someone says, ‘Oh, we’ve had enough vampire movies’, another vampire movie appears, another series of vampire books appears. People need this story right now. There’s a need when the horror that we see in the daily news is all around us all the time. We need to go to a place where there’s a story or a metaphor that helps us to understand that. I think that’s the power of the Dracula story.” Lambert talked through the intricate production process, describing how she recorded a first version with uncredited actors. This then acted as a template for sound designer Anthony Moore and Composer Ilan Eshkeri (House of Guiness), who wrote the haunting choir-based score having previously collaborated with Audible on 1984. The main actors were then brought into record the final version, working alone in separate booths for sound quality, rather than altogether on a single audio stage. “It was sort of how you make an animated film. First, you do a temporary voice track with storyboards, and then you gradually add the pieces of the pie to make it work… and then, this incredibly talented cast came in,” she explained. Lambert said that directing only the actors’ voices had been a liberating experience in many ways. “Of course, you want to see Jonathan Bailey’s face when he’s acting, he’s amazing, but that just wasn’t an option,” she said. “But there were so many other things that you can do… you can repeat the performance over and over again… you don’t have to worry about, “Oh, if we do this take again, we have to reset the cameras, we have to reset the lights, we have to bring in makeup.’ You can just really drill down on, ‘Do we have the emotion? Are we happy with the way this sounds?’ A scene in the English-language preview in which Mina telepathically fights off Dracula’s advances suggests a seductive, coercive edge to Bailey’s interpretation of Dracula. “There’s some very sexual stuff in Dracula and there’s some very sexual stuff in the script,” said Lambert. “It was directing the actors to go to that place of sensuality and desire and to go for it… some of the outtakes are pretty hot.” Riccardo Scamarcio, Benedetta Porcaroli, Esmeralda Pimentel, Claudia Salas and Asier Etxeandia attend a panel for the Audible “Dracula: A New Chapter In Cinematic Audio” panel in Venice Photo by Carlo Paloni/Getty Images for Audible The presentation also previewed the same scene from the upcoming Italian, Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish versions, with Italian actors Riccardo Scamarcio (A Haunting in Venice) and Benedetta Porcaroli (The Leopard); Spain’s Asier Etxeandia (Pain and Glory) and Claudia Salas (Furia), and Mexican star Esmeralda Pimentel (Hombre al Agua) taking to the stage to discuss their experiences playing either Dracula or Mina. Scamarcio said taking on the role had chimed with his own personal convictions around the importance of sound in feature film, citing a study suggesting that sound influenced the emotions of spectators more than images. “I’ve always paid attention to sound he said, especially when directing. When I was proposed this role I was immediately interested,” he said. Co-star Porcaroli revealed Dracula was her first experience working on an audio production. “I‘ve had a lot of fun dubbing animated features in the past but this was very different and a whole other level,” said the actress, whose voice animation credits include the Italian version of The Croods: A New Age. “You’re acting but with your body and the usual supports of costumes and makeup… You have to replace all these things with only the element of the voice,” she said. “It was complicated and we rehearsed a lot but it was rich experience and I learned a lot.” The English, Italian, French, Spanish and Latam Spanish versions of Dracula launch on Audible on October 1 2026, followed by German and Brazilian versions in 2027.