‘Dracula’ gets fresh spin in Netflix show by ‘Sherlock’ duo
Steven Moffat is well-versed in making old stories new again.
The Scottish TV writer/producer, best known for “Sherlock” and “Doctor Who,” has turned to “Dracula” for his next work. The three-part BBC/Netflix miniseries, already out in the UK (it premiered to 3.6 million viewers on Jan. 1) hits Netflix Saturday for American audiences.
“It certainly wasn’t any kind of plan. I didn’t think I’d do a succession of Victorian adaptations,” Moffat, 58, tells the Post. “It’s more because I’m a natural fanboy at heart. I like lots of old stories. I’m certainly not wandering through the library looking for the next one. But things like Dracula or Sherlock Holmes — these are characters that have fascinated people for over a century.
“There’s obviously something hugely compelling about them.”
Moffat’s “Dracula,” starring 52-year-old Danish actor Claes Bang in the titular role, is an adaptation of the classic 1897 Bram Stoker novel, which follows young lawyer Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan, “The Crown”) sent to visit a mysterious client named Count Dracula, who lives in a sinister castle. Spoiler alert: Harker is not being paranoid and everything is exactly as spooky as it seems.
Moffat, who co-created “Dracula” with his “Sherlock” writing partner Mark Gatiss, said the idea originated while they were making the Emmy-winning “Sherlock” (which made Benedict Cumberbatch a star and aired from 2010 to 2017).
“We started about halfway through ‘Sherlock,’” he says. “Mark had a photograph on his phone of Benedict with his collar turned up in silhouette and showed it to the head of BBC drama and said, ‘Look, it looks a bit like Dracula!’ So that was a sort of jokey conversation, and didn’t result in anything. But I suppose it started the thought that since we’d done Sherlock Holmes, should we try the next most-adapted character in fiction?”
Moffat and Gatiss are known to put their own twists on classic stories, for instance putting a modern-day spin on “Sherlock.” Unlike that show, “Dracula” begins with horse-drawn carriages, just like the source material. But Moffat and Gatiss took other liberties.
“One of our particular interests was to try to move him to the center of the story,” says Moffat. “Whereas as you know in the book, and in most of the films, he’s mostly an offstage presence in the shadows,” Moffat says. “We thought [that] to bring him into the limelight and hear what he’s got to say for himself might be interesting.”
And Moffat says it was a deliberate decision to cast a relative unknown like Bang in the lead.
“It was important to be a brand-new face. When we cast Benedict [Cumberbatch] as Sherlock Holmes, he could sort of own the role because at that point he had no other associations,” he says. “He just sort of became Sherlock Holmes for a while. We wanted somebody who could own Dracula the same way.
“We presented [casting director Kate Rhodes James] with what we thought was an impossible conundrum: we wanted someone in their 40s or 50s, because Dracula has to be a bit seamier,” he says. “We wanted someone stunningly handsome, a born leading man who could command the role, but someone we’d never heard of who wasn’t familiar from another part… and we also wanted somebody who didn’t look English, because Dracula is not English.
“We wanted to move outside our own normal [comfort] area,” he says. “Eventually the person Kate suggested was Claes. And I looked at a clip of him and texted Mark and he had a look and we all just thought, ‘Well that’s it. It’s like Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi had a baby. It’s perfect.’”