A dark recording booth, lit in moody blue. Jonathan Bailey stands at the microphone in headphones, his shirt open a few buttons lower than strictly necessary for audio work.
He closes his eyes. His voice drops to a low, hungry murmur. And his hand starts sliding, very slowly, across his chest.
On the other end of that scene, Mina is about to drink.
That’s the behind-the-scenes clip from Audible’s new Dracula, and since it dropped on October 1, people have been replaying it with the volume turned very, very low. The video is coming up. But Jonathan has his own account of what was going on in that booth, including who was never in there with him.
Jonathan Bailey Is Audible’s Newest Count
Audible released its full-cast audio adaptation of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula on October 1. It runs just under six hours, and Jonathan plays the Count.
If you somehow missed his rise, he’s the 38-year-old Brit who made us swoon as Anthony in Bridgerton, broke our hearts as Tim in Fellow Travelers and danced through Oz as Fiyero in Wicked. He was also People‘s Sexiest Man Alive last year. Casting him as literature’s most seductive monster was not a subtle choice, and nobody is complaining.
Ella Purnell (Fallout) plays Mina, and this version puts her at the center of the story. Aimee Lou Wood is Lucy, Louis Partridge is Jonathan Harker, and Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Professor Van Helsing, with David Jonsson, Johnny Flynn and Lesley Manville rounding out the cast. Mary Lambert, who directed the 1989 cult horror classic Pet Sematary, makes her audiobook directing debut.
The 43 Seconds Everyone Keeps Replaying
The clip, first released by Entertainment Tonight, shows Jonathan and Ella recording the scene in which Mina feeds from Dracula. Expect heavy breathing, a lot of whispering and, for reasons that will become clear, an apple.
Headphones on. Maybe not at your desk.
The most popular reaction we found went straight for what you’d expect: Jonathan’s open shirt and the hand caressing his chest. That one post has racked up more than 135,000 likes.
Others were busy with Ella’s half of the scene. She clutches her own throat to get the sounds right, and that juicy bite when Mina drinks? That’s Ella sinking her teeth into an apple.
On Reddit, the crowd split down the middle, as IBTimes UK noted. One commenter called it “hot, but also viscerally cringey.” Another went with “The cringe it stings my soul.” A lot of people simply started asking whether audiobooks were their new thing now.
They Were Never Actually in the Same Room
That chemistry is even more impressive once you know Jonathan and Ella recorded their parts separately.
“It’s funny, I’ve actually not ever met Aimee Lou Wood or David Jonsson or Ella Purnell,” Jonathan told Collider. Instead, he worked alone in the booth with two actors who read the other characters’ lines, while Mary directed from the other side of the glass.
So all that heavy breathing was aimed at a microphone, not at Ella. The tension you hear was built in the edit.
Jonathan also explained the grosser sounds. Asked how he produced the wet, slurping noises of Dracula feeding, he credited “a whole childhood of making noises and sounds alone up in my room,” adding that he’d “finally found a place to put them to good use.”
Jonathan Says the Booth Got “Really Icky”
When Bustle mentioned that Mary would have loved for listeners to see him acting it all out, Jonathan laughed it off. “I think it would have been really icky, actually!”
He compared recording to “a bit like a séance”: shut down your other senses and everything feels heightened. Because nobody can see you, he said, you can “commit 250%.”
Well, Jonathan. About that.
He also has a theory about why the role slides so easily from scary to steamy. Eroticism, horror and desire, he told Collider, sit very close together: “there’s a very sort of thin, permeable membrane between the three of them because it’s so visceral and it’s very animal, and it’s very instinctive.”
Audible Knows Exactly What It’s Selling
Audible isn’t pretending this is a cozy bedtime story. Its own Instagram teaser calls the adaptation “indisputably sensual, deathly disturbing, and absolutely inescapable,” then warns: “Listen at your own risk.”
In that video, as Parade reported, Jonathan describes the Count plainly: “He is a monster of seduction and he’s preying on her.” The comments filled up with fans who learned the hard way not to press play with the sound on in public.
Why Jonathan Says Dracula Is Really About Shame
Under all the heavy breathing, Jonathan has a more serious take on this monster, and it’s one a lot of our readers will recognize.
He’s openly gay and runs the Shameless Fund, an LGBTQ+ charity. Bustle brought up a line Stoker wrote to a friend after the novel came out: “Lord forgive me. I am quite shameless.” Jonathan ran with it.
“Dracula is many things, and one of them is this ominous manifestation of our cultural shame,” he said.
He pointed to the late Victorian “sense of control and expectation on everyone to limit their desires, their deepest wishes, their independence, and their identity.” That pressure, he said, “is always going to be a completely modern story.”
“Shame is something we all feel, no matter your identity, and some feel it much more than others, depending on where you live and which stories you’re told,” he added. His goal is to reach that shame so intimately that “people feel shameless and empowered by it.”
Plenty of gay men know exactly what he means. And he’s not the first openly gay actor to put on the cape: Luke Evans played the Count in Dracula Untold.
Headphones Strongly Recommended
Dracula is available now on Audible.
French, Italian and Spanish-language versions launched the same day, and Audible plans an interactive story built around Renfield in the coming months.
And if one Count isn’t enough, Collider asked Jonathan whether he’d ever record for Quinn, the app for steamy audio stories. “Well, nothing’s not on the table,” he said, “and maybe when I do a Quinn story, it might be called On the Table, or Under the Table.” He’d “have to take my Dracula fangs out for that one, maybe.”
No Quinn project has been announced. Until then, Dracula will have to do. Just keep the volume down on the bus.