Jonathan Bailey as Dracula: Mary Lambert talks casting the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ as vampire

There couldn’t have been a more apt name than Mary Lambert to helm the new Audible Original adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 seminal Gothic novel Dracula. She’s no stranger to horror, having helmed films like Pet Sematary (1989), an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1983 bestseller. She’s also been an aficionado of sound, music, and aural effects, having directed trailblazing music videos of pop stars like Madonna and Janet Jackson. And she’s certainly not new to the cocktail of spirituality and sex that is Dracula, having collaborated with Madonna in the highly controversial 1989  video “Like A Prayer”.

“Why not a Black Jesus?,” Lambert recalls suggesting to Madonna when the Grammy winner pitched making out with a Black guy at the altar in the music video of “Like A Prayer”. It invited the ire of “a lot of fundamentalist Christians and other people who want to use religion to control people, instead of connecting people,” claims the director in an exclusive interview with SCREEN.

She believes that unlike the extremely conservative Americans, Indians have historically been far more open to the idea of embracing sex, a la the Kamasutra. “Indians deal with sexuality much better. They acknowledge that sex and sexual desire are religious experiences. Religious ecstasy is very close to what people experience as sexual ecstasy. And I don’t mean that in a religious way, but as something like being consumed by desire to a point that you’re not limited to your body,” argues Lambert.

So, when she had People’s Sexiest Man Alive of last year — Jonathan Bailey — cast as Dracula, she could use his magnetic persona to make the audience’s imagination run wild, despite the obvious setback of them not being able to watch Bailey in all his glory as the mythical vampire on screen. “Jonathan is an extremely attractive man, and not just physically. He’s so charming. Sexiness is much more than that. It definitely helps to have a gorgeous face, beautiful hair, and lovely skin, but there’s something else that makes someone sexy — it’s their personality and humanity. You really feel there’s a lovely, thoughtful, and funny person inside there. He really responds to you in that moment,” says Lambert.

Beyond not projecting Bailey’s visual as the sinister, otherworldly aristocrat, directing an audio show was a challenge for Lambert because as a painter, she’s also a very “visual” person. “That’s what I enjoy most about movies — making paintings that move,” she says, adding, “But with sound, you can leave people to their own imagination. When you listen and visualize, the sunlight feels more real and the castle more frightening, instead of watching a movie, where the castle just looks like a hotel!”

On learning horror storytelling from Stephen King

Lambert is an advocate for whipping out of imagination than consumption on a platter also because she’s a book nerd. That’s also what led to her helming Pet Sematary, which she confesses was difficult to adapt. “Stephen King uses the character’s voice as the singular point of view, and the readers read their thoughts. For instance, when you read Pet Sematary, you know what Louis Creed is thinking. He wants to kill the cat. He hates his daughter. These are things people don’t share. But we understand that’s what drives him in order to bring his son back to life,” says the filmmaker.

Dracula, starring Jonathan Bailey, is now available on Audible! 🧛🏻‍♂️🔊 https://t.co/SMm7EB8QIN

— best of jonathan bailey (@badpostjbailey) October 1, 2026

But with Dracula, the job was made slightly easier by multiple characters’ points of view. “They write diaries and letters, and they tear them off sometimes. More often than not, the first letters they write are what they actually think. It’s a difficult thing to visualize what someone is saying to themselves. Sometimes, it’s conveyed through narration, but I feel it’s best done through performance. It’s easier in an audio drama because there are no visuals to distract from it. Sometimes, we’d do a sequence over and over again until we were on the same page. Because there are no cameras, sets, hair, and makeup to take care of after every shot,” adds Lambert, heaving a sigh of relief.

Fallout star Ella Purnell, who voices Mina Murray in Dracula, is not designed as his “hapless victim”, as has been the trope in several previous iterations. Lambert feels she was able to achieve that because of two key changes in the three decades since Pet Sematary. “Studios and financiers realized that women were making up a large percentage of the audience for certain horror movies. Also, more young women began directing horror movies,” pointed out the director.

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“As a result, female characters began to have more agency in the plots of horror films. The female nature — and men can have a female nature — is more in touch with instinct, spirituality, and the invisible world. So, this worked well in movies like The Others (2001), The Ring (2002), Insidious (2010), The Conjuring (2013), A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, and The Babadook (2014),” says Lambert, adding, “Women could even be villains! Like Amy Madigan, who totally changed the face of horror in Weapons, my favorite movie of 2025, largely because of her performance and its implications.”