“Try and stay calm, you’re doing very well,” Claes Bang’s Dracula assures a terrified young man in the first footage from The BBC’s new three-part series. It’s as if he were talking directly to creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, who chose Bram Stoker’s classic monster to anchor their first new series since Benedict Cumberbatch donned the coat of Sherlock Holmes.
The BBC shared a choppy first look at the new series, which lacks an official release date, but nonetheless features a blood-red “coming soon” at its end. In addition to Bang (The Square, The Affair) as the title character, the Dracula footage also offers us a look at The Crown star John Heffernan as Jonathan Harker, Dolly Wells (Doll & Em) as Sister Agatha and Joanna Scanlan (Getting On) as Mother Superior.
The cast otherwise includes Morfydd Clark, Sacha Dhawan, Jonathan Aris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Lyndsey Marshal, Chanel Cresswell, Matthew Beard and Lydia West. Directors for the three-part series include Jonny Campbell (Westworld), Damon Thomas (Killing Eve) and Paul McGuigan (Sherlock).
Gatiss previously described their rendition of Dracula as “the hero of his own story, and less of a shadowy presence” while the series itself is set to air on BBC One in the UK, and stream on Netflix outside the U.K.