Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss will start writing their Dracula series “next month” – and they have some great ideas

“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.