Inside Audible’s ‘Dracula’ Gamble: An A-List Cast, Record Opening and “Cinema for the Ears”

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.

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“We learn from failure, not from success,” Bram Stoker wrote in his 1897 novel Dracula. More than a century later, his tale of a centuries-old Transylvanian noble and vampire keeps succeeding, most recently in audio.

A month after its release, Audible’s full-cast original production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula holds the biggest opening week of any Audible Original ever released. It also ranks fourth among all titles in Audible’s catalog, measured by listening starts in the first seven days.

The star-studded cast includes Ella Purnell (Fallout) as Mina, Jonathan Bailey (Wicked) as Dracula, Louis Partridge (Enola Holmes) as Jonathan, David Jonsson (Industry) as Dr. Seward, Aimee Lou Wood (The White Lotus) as Lucy, Johnny Flynn (Emma) as Renfield, Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread) as Mrs. Westenra and Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Professor Van Helsing. Horror filmmaker Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary) directs, and Ilan Eshkeri (Audible’s 1984, Netflix’s House of Guinness) composed the score.

In a time when adaptations of literary classics continue to make their way onto the small and big screen, Audible aimed to offer something different to embrace the novel’s terror living “in what you hear and what you imagine,” says Aurelie de Troyer, Audible’s head of content, international. Stoker’s novel, built from letters and diary entries, is “genuinely meant for this medium,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter.

De Troyer says going all out on a classic adaptation accomplishes two things: It feeds an “insatiable appetite for these stories,” and it shows “what premium audio can do.” It can also make a classic novel more accessible. “For a novel like Dracula written in 1897, there’s a real barrier to entry for some audiences,” she says. “But if you give listeners a cinematic audio experience with Jonathan Bailey, Ella Purnell and spatial sound design? Suddenly you’ve made Stoker accessible in a completely new way.”

The success could also travel beyond audio. “Audio can actually serve as proof of concept,” de Troyer says. Asked whether studios or streamers have come calling, she teases: “Watch this space.”

In an interview with THR, de Troyer details the making of Dracula, pitching an audio-only horror production to Hollywood talent and which classics are next in Audible’s pipeline.

Dracula has been adapted for almost every medium already. Why was this the right title for Audible’s next big classic after Pride and Prejudice and 1984?

We’re always asking ourselves: What’s a story that keeps pulling people back, generation after generation? Dracula is one of those eternally magnetic narratives. But more than that, we ask ourselves, what stories are truly meant to be heard? And Dracula is genuinely meant for this medium. If you go back to Stoker’s original novel, it’s constructed entirely from letters, diary entries, fragmented testimony. Character voices piecing together a mystery in real time. The terror doesn’t live in what you see; it lives in what you hear and what you imagine. The whispering voice at the edge of the room, Dracula’s breath at your ear. The silence before the scream. Audio completes that experience fully.

After Pride and Prejudice and 1984, we searched for something visceral, a timeless classic that would let us explore fear through sound. And frankly, there’s an insatiable appetite for this story. Audiences keep returning to Dracula because it never truly leaves us. The story just waits for the right medium, the right moment to feel urgent again. This is one of those moments.

Did the plan start in English and then expand, or was it conceived as a seven-language event from the beginning? How did that change the budget and the greenlight conversation?

It was conceived as a global project from the start; we knew that if we were going to invest in something this ambitious, we wanted to do it properly across our key markets. True, global storytelling doesn’t only live in translation. Audible’s mission is built through local voices and creative teams, and cultural authenticity.

The English adaptation established the foundation with Mary Lambert’s direction, Robyn Ahern’s script, Ilan Eshkeri’s score, the sound design architecture. But then each territory developed their own adaptation with unique cultural context. The Italian production with Riccardo Scamarcio and Benedetta Porcaroli isn’t simply the English version dubbed. The production is directed and performed by Italian artists for Italian listeners. The same is true for French with Omar Sy, for Spanish, for German, for Brazilian Portuguese.

Of course, as the ambitions of the production grew as did the budget. But we’re not treating this as an experiment. This is a statement of intent about what premium audio storytelling can be. The investment reflects our belief that audiences today follow stories, not formats. They move fluidly between screens, pages, and sound. We need to meet them there with the same level of craft and ambition they expect from prestige film or television.

What did Audible’s 2012 multi-narrator edition of Dracula teach you about what listeners want from this book, and what was the goal to do differently this time?

The 2012 edition showed us there was genuine appetite for Dracula in audio, and that the epistolary structure of letters and diary entries actually works beautifully when performed by multiple voices. Listeners responded to that intimacy, that sense of eavesdropping on private testimony. The 2026 version has world-class direction, an original choral score recorded live at St. Augustine’s Cathedral with 75 voices, spatial Dolby Atmos sound design, and a reimagined script that brings Mina to the absolute center of the story.

Robyn Ahern’s adaptation keeps Stoker’s structure but makes Mina feel like a true detective. She is someone who is actively reconstructing events, piecing together the mystery, and ultimately catching this monster. The psychological duel between Mina and Dracula becomes the engine of the story, and audio is uniquely positioned to make that feel intimate, claustrophobic, uncomfortable.

When did Jonathan Bailey come into the picture? Was he the first piece and the cast was built around him, or did the Mina-centered approach shape who you went after first?

It was crucial that we got the casting of both Mina and Dracula right for each adaptation. The Mina-centered approach absolutely shaped our casting strategy. We knew we needed someone who could carry the emotional architecture of the entire production, someone with extraordinary range who could go from vulnerability to strength, from terror to defiance. When Ella Purnell came on board, that gave us our center of gravity.

We needed a Dracula who had the vocal control to be seductive and terrifying in equal measure, someone who could make you lean in and then make you want to run. Jonathan has that range. His vocal precision was truly riveting. And in the booth, he’s extraordinary. He understood immediately that Dracula isn’t just a monster. He’s a predator playing the long game with every phrase calculated, every pause with intent.

For Jonathan and the cast, how was an audio-only Dracula pitched and what was the response when being offered to take on this kind of project?

We pitched it as cinema for the ears. We were very clear that this wouldn’t be traditional. With a full cast of talented elite actors working together, paired with a fully immersive, spatial audio experience with the scale and craft of a prestige limited series. A huge draw for the actors of our English language cast in particular was the opportunity to work with renowned horror director, Mary Lambert in our London studios.

In casting for a project that is built on voice alone, what do you listen for that a film casting director might not? For example, were there any auditions or chemistry reads with Jonathan and Ella?

Voice is everything, obviously, but it’s not just about having a beautiful or distinctive voice. We’re listening for emotional range, for control, for the ability to communicate intention without visual cues. In film, an actor can rely on facial expressions, body language, the environment around them. In audio, all of that has to come through vocally. A pause. A gasp. The texture of a whisper. The way someone delivers a line when they’re lying versus when they’re telling the truth.

The cast members actually recorded in separate booths so throughout each recording we used our brilliant stand in actors, who were consistent across each actors recordings, so were able to draw on the performances of our leads when paired with the next actor to mirror the performance. Where possible during the recording period, we also would play the performances of actors who have already recorded so they could get a sense of what they were performing against. Mary was brilliant at guiding Jonathan and Ella and the rest of the cast, making sure they were in conversation, even when they weren’t in the same physical space.

With Maggie Gyllenhaal cast as Van Helsing, was gender-flipping the role part of the adaptation’s design from the start, or did it come out of casting?

It was part of Audible and Robyn Ahern’s early conversations and design while writing the adaptation. In Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing is this paternalistic figure. Brilliant, but very much a product of Victorian masculinity. Together with Robyn and Audible’s incredible content and creative teams, we wanted to reimagine that character as a woman, someone who brings a different kind of authority and a different relationship to Mina. Not protective in a patriarchal sense, but collaborative. Two brilliant women facing down an ancient male predator together.

When we started thinking about who could embody that, Maggie was at the top of the list. She has this incredible combination of intellect, intensity, and warmth. Her voice carries authority without being cold. And she understood immediately what we were trying to do: create a Van Helsing who feels contemporary and refuses to be dismissed or underestimated.

With such a large ensemble, how do star schedules work for a full-cast recording? Did they ever record in the same room, or was it mostly done separately?

One of the advantages of audio production over screen is flexibility. We don’t need the entire cast available in the same place at the same time. If we were making this for television or film, we might need an actor for months. In audio, we may only need them for a concentrated period, sometimes just a few days, depending on their role.

Most of the principal recording was done in discrete booths, which gives us clean tracks that can be edited and spatially positioned in post-production. That also allows actors to be completely free in their performance.

Mary Lambert is a filmmaker making her audio debut. What did a film director bring to the booth rather than an experienced audio drama director?

Fresh eyes. Fresh ears. Mary came in without preconceptions about what audio drama “should” be, and that gave her enormous freedom. She approached it structurally, almost like storyboarding. She’s a very visual thinker, and considered the imagery of transitions between scenes, understood how to build tension without necessarily visual cues, about how music and sound design could do the work that lighting and cinematography normally do.

She also brought her instincts from horror filmmaking, which was invaluable. Mary understands pacing, atmosphere, and how to withhold information to create dread. She knows that what you don’t show, or in this case don’t explicitly tell, is often more.

Stoker’s novel is told in letters and diaries. How did Robyn Ahern turn that structure into a dialogue-led drama, and how much narration was kept?

Robyn was brilliant at preserving the story architecture while making it feel immediate and dramatic. The novel is fragmented testimony, and that structure is part of what makes it so unsettling. You’re piecing together the horror alongside the characters.

What Robyn did was honor that fragmentary quality but transform those written accounts into actual voiced testimony. So instead of a narrator reading “From Mina Murray’s journal,” you hear Mina speaking directly to you, confiding in you. The intimacy of someone writing in their diary translates beautifully into audio when it becomes a first-person confession. She kept enough narration to maintain that sense of distance and documentation, but the majority of the adaptation is dialogue and internal monologue.

How did Ilan Eshkeri’s score and the sound design develop alongside the performances? Was music written to picture, or to the recorded dialogue?

Ilan began work on the score quite early in the process, almost in parallel with the scripting. We wanted the music to be foundational, not just decoration. Mary and Ilan worked very closely together to establish the emotional architecture of the production before we ever got into the recording booth.

The score was refined once we had recorded dialogue. In film, you compose to picture. Here, Ilan was scoring to what you hear and what you imagine. The music has to do some of the work that visuals normally do, for example establishing atmosphere, signaling danger, creating intimacy in the sensual moments between Dracula and Mina.

One of the most extraordinary choices Ilan made was using human voices as instruments and incorporating them into the soundtrack itself. We recorded the choral elements live at St. Augustine’s Cathedral with 75 voices. The result is deeply haunting. These wordless vocalizations that feel both sacred and profane, beautiful and terrifying.

The sound design team worked in lockstep with Ilan. They were thinking about how footsteps, breathing, ambient sound, and music would layer together in the spatial mix. Because we were finishing in Dolby Atmos, every element of sound has its own position in three-dimensional space. Dracula’s footsteps can circle behind you while his voice whispers in your ear, and Ilan’s score can swell above and around you. It’s genuinely immersive.

Does each language production use the same script translated, or did local teams have room to adapt? Do they share Eshkeri’s score and the sound design?

Each territory uses the English adaptation as a foundation, but local directors and creative teams absolutely have room to adapt for their specific cultural context and cast. These are seven distinct productions, not one master recording with substituted dialogue.

Language itself changes performance. Sentence length varies between English, Italian, French, Spanish. A pause that lands perfectly after a five-word English line might feel completely different after a longer Italian or German sentence. Social and geographical associations carried by accents are entirely different culture to culture. So local casting affects timing, editing, pacing, and even sound design.

Was Mary Lambert involved in all seven productions, or did each territory have its own director?

Mary directed the English production, which served as the creative template. But each territory had its own director who worked with local casts and brought their own sensibility to the material. That was essential. The key role of the director for our productions is to get the best performance possible out of the actors in studio, we needed directors who understood their local markets, who could work with actors in their native language, who knew what would resonate culturally.

Mary’s work established the tone, the pacing, the approach to horror and intimacy that we wanted across all versions. The other directors used that as a reference point, but they weren’t simply replicating what Mary did. They were interpreting it, making it their own. We gave them creative freedom because we trust that local voices know how to tell stories for their audiences better than we ever could from a centralized position.

How did you choose leads like Omar Sy, Riccardo Scamarcio and Matthias Schweighöfer? Was it about local box-office pull, or about what their voices could do?

Both. We needed actors who had genuine star power in their territories. All-star performers whose names would make audiences curious enough to press play. But we also needed actors whose voices could do the work and vocal range for the entire production. If the voice doesn’t captivate, if it doesn’t create intimacy and tension and fear, star power won’t save you.

Omar Sy has a huge following in France, but his voice also has this tremendous warmth and authority. When he plays Dracula, there’s a seductiveness to it that’s genuinely unsettling because you want to trust that voice, even as you know you shouldn’t. Riccardo Scamarcio brings a brooding intensity that works beautifully for the Italian Dracula. There’s danger in his voice, but also sophistication. Matthias Schweighöfer has this precision and control that makes the German production feel sharp and calculated.

We cast based on who’s right for the role and the format, and each cast brought new and delightful elements to the story. Some of our ensemble casts include major film stars alongside narrators who’ve spent their entire careers in audio, and the chemistry is unparalleled. At the end of the day, it’s the performance that matters.

It’s been a month since launch of the audible production. What can you share about performance, and which territories have surprised you?

The response has been extraordinary. Across all territories, we’re seeing both breadth and depth of new listeners discovering Audible through Dracula, plus existing members binging the production in its entirety. Listeners are genuinely enraptured.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula delivered the biggest opening week of any Audible Original ever released, and the fourth-biggest of any title in Audible’s catalogue, measured by listening starts in its first seven days.

Audible held a panel on this at the Venice International Film Festival. Is that a signal you see these productions as IP that could go to screen, or as a direct competitor for screen talent and audiences?

Neither competition nor a precursor to screen adaptation. Venice is the epicenter of creative celebration, a place where bold artistic ambition is recognized, and this project lives squarely in that space. We’re working with world-class directors, commissioning original scores, building intricate sound design, casting extraordinary talent. The craft and scale of what we’re doing deserves to be in rooms where ambitious storytelling is celebrated.

Venice is where new art forms are born, where artists gather to ask “what else is possible?” That’s exactly the question we’re asking at Audible. Not “how do we compete with film?” but “what can audio do that other mediums can’t?”

Audiences today don’t think in formats. They follow stories. They move fluidly between screens, pages, and sound. When a story resonates in one format, appetite grows across all others. The relationship between audio and cinema is one of expansion, not competition. We’ve seen this with Project Hail Mary—the Ryan Gosling film supercharged our already successful audiobook. The reverse is true as well. We’re incredibly excited about the HBO Harry Potter series. We just released all seven books as full-cast audio editions with immersive sound design to epic response, and now audiences will rediscover that story again in television form.

Has there been any interest from studios or streamers in a Dracula adaptation?

I can’t speak to specifics around Dracula, but I will say: watch this space. The quality of writing, directing, and performance in our productions is at a level that translates across mediums.

What’s interesting is that audio can actually serve as proof of concept. We’ve built the world, we’ve tested the characters, we’ve demonstrated that audiences are hungry for this story told in this way. If a studio or streamer wanted to adapt one of our productions for screen, they’d have a fully realized creative blueprint and built-in audience awareness.

Our primary focus is on making the best possible audio experience. If interest comes from other mediums, that’s a bonus. It’s validation that we’re doing something special.

Audiobooks can enhance reading for readers who prefer to enjoy a book in that format. Do you also see this as a way into the book for people who would never pick up an 1897 novel? What is the appeal of doing a production like this for a classic novel? Do you track whether listeners go on to buy the book?

For a novel like Dracula written in 1897, there’s a real barrier to entry for some audiences. The language can feel dense, and the pacing is Victorian. But if you give listeners a cinematic audio experience with Jonathan Bailey, Ella Purnell, and spatial sound design? Suddenly you’ve made Stoker accessible in a completely new way. In no way are we making Stoker’s classic more digestible or bite sized. We’re simply contemporizing the story for the audio format.

The appeal of doing classics is twofold. First, there’s insatiable appetite for these stories. Audiences return because they never truly left, and new generations learn the stories in fresh and new ways. Second, classics demonstrate what premium audio can do. If we can make a 127-year-old novel feel urgent and visceral, we’re proving that audio is a legitimate art form with limitless creative potential.

Which public-domain classics are next on the slate, and is there a European-language classic that could lead in its own language instead of English?

I can’t announce specific titles yet, but yes we are looking at other public domain classics, as well as stories that aren’t in the public domain but where we’re working with estates and rights holders to bring them to life in a brand new way. We are exploring European-language classics that could lead in their own language. Why should the English-language production always be the template? There are extraordinary Italian, French, Spanish, German novels that deserve to be produced with the same scale and ambition and then expand into other territories.