Audible Unleashes Its Biggest Audio Production Yet: A Seven-Language Dracula with Jonathan Bailey as the Count

Audible previewed its multilingual adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend, giving festival audiences a first listen to what the company calls its biggest audio production to date (Deadline).

Jonathan Bailey plays Dracula in the English-language version. Ella Purnell plays Mina, the vampire's object of desire, and Maggie Gyllenhaal takes the central connecting role of Professor Van Helsing. Aimee Lou Wood is also among the cast. The English version is directed by Mary Lambert, best known for the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, making her audio directorial debut on the project. Robyn Ahern wrote the adaptation (Deadline).

Gyllenhaal's casting carried an extra frisson at Venice: she was this year's president of the festival's jury, the panel that awards the Golden Lion (Deadline).

The scale of the production is what sets it apart from a standard audiobook. Audible is rolling out Dracula in seven languages — English, Castilian Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin American Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Each language version features its own local A-list cast and director, all taking their cue from Lambert's English-language production. That means seven separate recordings, not dubbed translations of a single track (Deadline; Deadline).

Aurelie de Troyer, Head of Audible Content, oversaw the project. The Venice preview landed roughly three weeks ahead of the production's public release: Dracula launches on Audible on 1 October 2026 (Variety).

For a company built on spoken-word audio, staging a preview at one of the world's most prestigious film festivals is a deliberate signal. Venice programmes cinema, not podcasts, and Audible chose that stage to frame Dracula as something closer to a theatrical event than a commuter download — a full-cast, multi-language production with named directors and A-list performers in every market.

The cast brings serious heat. Bailey is fresh off his blockbuster turn as Fiyero in Wicked, Purnell broke out in Fallout, and Wood won a Bafta for Sex Education. Lambert's move from horror cinema to audio, on a property as durable as Stoker's 1897 novel, gives the project an unusually high-profile creative lineage for the format.

The 1 October release puts Dracula in the autumn corridor, when Audible's listening audience swells alongside the return of commutes and school runs. Seven casts. Seven languages. One vampire.