Cole Haddon used to cover television and film for Film.com, Baltimore City Paper and Orlando Weekly. He is also an accomplished comic book author with The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde and Space Gladiators to his credit.
Haddon has been working as a screenwriter, and his first project to make it toTV is NBC’s “Dracula.” Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as Count Dracula, now impersonating an American industrialist selling electricity in the late 1800s. We got to speak with Haddon by phone about his take on the classic character and bringing it to television.
CraveOnline: How far do you have a plan mapped out for where the “Dracula” series can go?
Cole Haddon: When I first brought it to NBC, I came with essentially an outline for season one as well as a loose skeleton for the next four seasons. So from the start, I thought it was very important to have an idea of where everything was going. It’s the part of me that never appreciated the Star Wars prequels because they just seemed kind of made up on the fly. I figure if you’re going to put the work into it, you should know where everything is going to go.
Is there any basis for this idea of Dracula impersonating an American in the Bram Stoker writings?
No, in Bram Stoker’s novel, you have a monster who is an Eastern European count who arrives in England really in control with his persona and startling everyone. So I wanted to hold true to that, but the character itself as presented in the novel just didn’t really have a lot of relevance today.
It was so creepy and it’s a beautiful novel, one I love and I’ve actually reread about every four or five years of my adult life. But the character of Dracula didn’t say anything that seemed worth turning to every week. So I wanted to hold true to that dramatic entry into London, but here make him this American industrialist with this very specific vision for the future that would pit him against his historic enemies, a much more fundamentalist organization.
Is he actually the American industrialist, and the European count is the persona?
He is Vlad Tepes, the actual Vlad the Impaler who became a monster named Dracula, and he terrorized people for about three centuries before he vanished from the secret history books. He’s been gone for about a century. When we meet him he’s in suspended animation and he’s resurrected via a blood sacrifice. From there, his enemies, those he’s seeking vengeance against, have forgotten he existed really.
So he manufactures this identity as this American to come to England as this sort of upstart to shake things up and use his science, his Elon Musk type vision for the future to destroy his enemies. At the end of the day, he used to be a human being named Vlad Tepes, then became a monster and now he’s playing a human being named Alexander Grayson, trying to remember what it’s like in this sort of sociopathic way to be human.
How did you come up with this new concept of Renfield?
Well, Renfield in the novel was always this loyal manservant, but the idea of the mad bird and insect eating character wasn’t appropriate to this first season. So I decided to look at it more as sort of the origin of how we get to that character, and that meant I needed this loyal manservant, someone that could serve as a confidant, but more also as a brother to Dracula in some way. Making him an educated black man, an American black lawyer in the 1890s just seemed to make him a perfect outsider, which is really what Alexander Grayson is and more how Dracula himself feels about himself. It’s a nice way to build some kinship between them and talk a little bit about race.
Is the idea that he will go crazy at some point?
Well, not in season one. I guess that is the unsexy way to tease things but yes, I believe the novel should be held sacred to some degree. So all of the characters in some way or another have to find their way back to who they were, in some way or another, in the novel. We juggle the timeline a little, but Renfield was always intended to go down that road eventually.
Are you trying to get Dracula into the sun as soon as possible?
That’s one of the great challenges of Dracula’s existence, isn’t it? He’s a night dweller who can’t walk in the sun, but hopes to find a way to do just that. It’s part of this interpretation of the character I privately enjoy the most, a vampire who can’t walk in the sunlight wants to bring light, the wireless electricity, the promise of light and electricity everywhere, of illumination to light up the world to human beings. It’s a strange irony of his messiah complex.
He’s trying to find, if not a cure, a way to function in daylight. Will that come to fruition sooner than later?
It is a challenge that needs to be conquered.
Was there ever any consideration to updating Dracula to the point where it would be modern day?
That for me was always off limits and a testament to some of the producers that they also had no interest in doing that. The character’s been abused so much by pop culture for so long, and a lot of that’s because he keeps trying to update him. They’re looking for that relevance, but the consequence has been the production of a lot of crap. The name Dracula has sort of been smeared by that in some way. That’s the great irony of the show I think is that the most novel thing about it is we just set it in the time period it’s supposed to take place. It’s mind boggling that that’s so daring.
