Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss will start writing their Dracula series “next month” – and they have some great ideas
The Sherlock co-creators are finally getting stuck into their next big project
While it sounds like Sherlock fans are going to wait a long time to see any more episodes, fans of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ writing do have something to look forward to in the pair’s upcoming take on Dracula, which was announced last year and remains mysterious.
However, the pair have now revealed that they’re getting stuck into the writing process in just a few weeks, and shared a few thoughts about the difficulties of adapting the story.
“Dracula? Well, we’ve got a lot of ideas, we need to go and sit down now and really talk about it,” Moffat told us at the Radio Times Covers Party earlier this week.
“But once we get moving, we’ll move fast.”
“It’s early stages,” Gatiss agreed. “We’ve had a lot of talks, a lot of meetings, our favourite part – throwing ideas around. We’re going to go away to start writing it… is it February yet? Next month.”
Of course, the biggest question on fans’ minds has been who might play Dracula – and while Gatiss said there were no concrete plans, he did hint at some of the different interpretations of the character the pair had been kicking around.
“Who could play Dracula himself? Well, that’s a very good question,” Gatiss said. “Or herself? No, that’s a mistake. That’ll haunt me for the next 10 years.
“It’s a very interesting question, because in Stoker’s novel he’s an old man, who does get younger. That’s rarely done. Gary Oldman did it, it’s rarely done. That’s quite interesting.
“But obviously, the point of Dracula was that he’s the first kind of Byronic vampire. He’s the first one that set pulses racing. The vampire tradition up to Stoker is much more horrible.
“I remember reading a book when I was a child, a pre-Dracula book, and when they find the vampire it’s fat like a slug, full of blood and its mouth is all gory. And I was horrified by that! Because you kind of grow up with the idea of Dracula being much more sophisticated.
“We’re not gonna go down that [slug] model, I think,” he joked. “So it’s a question of where we land on that scale, really. No idea who it’s going to be.”
Moffat, meanwhile, was more succinct, preferring to keep details of the new series under wraps for the time being.
“I’m really not telling you anything about what we’ve got,” he told us. “We know what we’re doing, but we’re not saying it yet.”
Still, Gatiss did give some idea of when we could expect Dracula, telling RadioTimes.com that he saw the project as taking “two years at least” (and subsequently delaying any Sherlock reunions to at least after that point).
We’re sure it’ll be worth the wait. If they can find the perfect actor to embody suave sophistication while also bringing to life a horrific bloody slug body, we reckon they’ll have judged it juussssst right.
