“Castlevania” Panel Recap at NYCC 2019

Adam Deats (Assistant Director), Adetokumboh M’Cormack (voice of Isaac), Aljeandra Reynoso (voice of Sypha), Graham McTavish (voice of Dracula), James Callis (voice of Alucard), Sam Deats (Director), and Warren Ellis (Screenwriter) all sat beside one another on stage to discuss aspects of the show, its characters, and everything in between when it comes to the new upcoming season.

“Every time I see that trailer, it’s so exciting, and it’s so dark. It’s interesting that something that is anime can be so truly scary. So really worrying. Disturbing, I would say! I think that makes it important. We’re chronicling something. There’s some — no pun intended — but some meat on the bones. And because, I suppose, we’ve all taken it so seriously — and the jeopardy stakes are so high — it’s not just about the characters, it’s about society, and the ripping apart of that society.” Callis detailed when it came to the new season.

Season two of the show leaves off on a heartbreaking yet hopeful end. The season three teaser, however, showed the more lighthearted side of the show, where Trevor and Sypha are traveling together by carriage, talking about their relationship, and attempting to draw monsters out of the woods to slay. Sypha drops some pretty hysterical one-liners, but we’re not gonna spoil everything.

When asked about Dracula being “dead inside,” McTavish had this to say: “That’s the interesting thing about Dracula — he’s not dead inside. He’s very much alive, despite, you know, appearances to the contrary. He feels emotion, and that’s what think is so interesting about this particular interpretation of the Dracula story. […] I just find that the heart of it is his love, and what she ignites in him that had lain dormant suddenly comes to life, and that’s what precipitates the rest of his story, because he can’t bear the thought of what’s happened to her, and all the vengeance, and then finally at the end with James that love comes back — and so, I am not dead inside. Thank you.” We may be reaching, but in the 0.0000001% chance Dracula is somehow alive in season three, this is going to be a great answer to look back on.

(Maybe Godbrand will come back too. Okay, we’ll stop dreaming now.)

“I imagine most of the people in this room know my secret by now: I never played the games,” Ellis admitted in the panel. “None of them. I mean, those things started coming out in the 80’s? In the 80’s, I was living in a rented room that was literally a converted dark room. It was six foot by six foot, I was lucky I had electricity — by which I mean literally one single, uncovered light bulb on the ceiling. I was born in the wrong era to be a gamer,” he explains. “There is a vast community of people who, judging by the web pages since the dawn of the world wide web, have been creating fan pages about the show. I’d just gotten down as much of the lore, the detail, the background, as they possibly could — as an act of love for the game series. So, in large part, this show does exist because of that impassioned fan community.”

We don’t have much to go on other than that teaser, but Castlevania season three will be ten episodes long, with a hopeful release by the end of the year. Get out your fake fangs, emotional trauma, and criticisms of the church as an institution — you never know when the new season may strike!