Jonny Brugh

Jonny Brugh is a television and comedy performer whose most prominent vampire role in the book is Deacon Brucke, the retired “Nazi vampire” in the 2014 comedy horror film What We Do In The Shadows. His account of the character presents performance itself as the source of Deacon’s strangeness: instead of merely reproducing established vampire conventions, Brugh treats the role as an alter ego, builds its comic contradictions through play, and turns erotic dance, knitting, and awkwardness into instruments of characterization.

Career and Vampire Role

Jonny Brugh had worked in television and comedy for many years before becoming best known, at least in the United Kingdom, for playing Deacon Brucke in What We Do In The Shadows. Deacon is identified as a retired “Nazi vampire,” a description that places him within the film’s deliberately excessive mixture of supernatural menace, historical absurdity, and domestic comedy. The role belongs to the later history of vampire representation in which vampires are no longer restricted to the elegant predator, the tragic aristocrat, or the purely frightening revenant.

That development forms part of a broader transformation traced in the book. Earlier figures such as Varney, Carmilla, Count Orlok, and Count Dracula helped establish recognizable literary and cinematic patterns: sharpened teeth, nocturnal predation, erotic danger, supernatural power, and the threatening body of the undead. Modern vampire fiction, however, increasingly allows vampires to be sympathetic, ridiculous, socially integrated, or openly self-conscious. Brugh’s Deacon belongs to this expanded field, where the vampire can be a comic performer as well as a monster.

Deacon as Alter Ego

When asked about his inspiration for Deacon, Brugh rejects the idea that he simply interpreted a character supplied by the writers. He explains that he invented Deacon and brought him to the shoot, describing the vampire as a version of himself and an alter ego suppressed in ordinary life so as not to offend other people. The writers, he says, did not know what he would do and wanted him to surprise them.

This distinction makes Deacon’s comic force depend on the tension between public restraint and theatrical release. Brugh’s description frames the character as a shadow self: traits that are contained in everyday social behavior are released through the vampire’s exaggerated body and conduct. The result is not a psychological biography established by the film, but a performance method in which the actor’s concealed impulses become material for a deliberately unruly persona. Deacon’s identity therefore arises through improvisational risk rather than through an exhaustive prewritten explanation.

Sexy, Nerdy, and Improvised

Brugh identifies two apparently incompatible qualities as central to Deacon: he should be sexy and nerdy. Knitting and erotic dance become the practical means of holding those qualities together. The combination is funny precisely because it refuses the usual separation between vampire glamour and comic ineptitude. Deacon can gesture toward seduction while remaining visibly awkward, overcommitted, or socially peculiar.

The infamous erotic dance scene was fully improvised. Brugh wanted the sequence to retain what he calls the unsuccessful and intermediate parts of dancing rather than presenting a polished routine. When the production found itself without an idea one morning, he proposed the erotic dance. The costume department supplied a fishnet vest, and the scene developed around “Snake Charming Music,” improvised rhyme, and unusual movements. Brugh had also looked at the erotic dance in Metropolis and attempted to pay homage to it.

The scene’s comic value thus comes from the gap between intention and execution. Deacon intends to be erotic, but the performance preserves the failed transitions, strange movements, and visible effort that prevent the dance from becoming conventional seduction. The fishnet vest, improvised music, and borrowed cinematic reference transform the scene into a miniature history of vampire style: glamour is invoked, then bent toward embarrassment and play.

Improvisation and Ensemble Performance

Brugh describes the film’s creative process as dependent on actors who enjoy playing together. Simple character traits can be enough to generate a scene, while excessive preparation may limit the possibilities for humor. Keeping the script hidden from the actors helped prevent them from becoming too preoccupied with preparation and allowed confused moments to emerge naturally.

For Brugh, the strongest filmmakers recognize what appears on the day and adapt during the moment of play. The actors need to know the purpose of a scene, but they must also be free to explore around it. He therefore approached Deacon by allowing situations to create the character rather than fixing every action in advance. This method makes uncertainty productive: confusion is not an error to be removed but a source of the comic texture that distinguishes What We Do In The Shadows from more solemn vampire narratives.

Place in Vampire Culture

Brugh expresses limited enthusiasm for vampire story culture as a whole, although he enjoys some kitsch elements of vampire chic and admires Gary Oldman’s performance in Dracula. The aspect he says he may have absorbed subconsciously is the grumpy quality of Oldman’s Dracula. This admission connects Deacon to an established screen tradition while also keeping the connection indirect. Deacon is not presented as another version of Count Dracula; instead, a trace of the irritable, burdened vampire survives inside a comic character whose habits and performance are far more eccentric.

The contrast reflects the book’s account of vampire culture as both historically serious and persistently adaptable. The nineteenth century associated vampires with disease, sexual transgression, death, and fear; twentieth-century cinema established visual conventions through figures such as Count Orlok and Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula; later forms made vampires objects of satire, music, fashion, television fandom, and subcultural identity. The goth subculture that emerged from early-1980s British post-punk clubs demonstrates how undead imagery could become a durable cultural style rather than merely a sign of horror. Brugh’s Deacon extends that process into comedy, making the vampire’s accumulated style available for affectionate distortion.

Narrative and Comic Significance

Jonny Brugh’s importance in the book lies less in a detailed biography than in the way his performance clarifies a major phase in the history of the vampire. Deacon Brucke carries the residue of older vampire images—menace, historical darkness, erotic display, and theatrical self-presentation—but rearranges them into an ensemble comedy. His “Nazi vampire” identity is already an absurd collision of grand historical horror and supernatural cliché; knitting and erotic dance push the collision into everyday behavior.

The character also demonstrates that the modern vampire need not become harmless in order to become funny. The genre’s old threats remain recognizable, but they are exposed as costumes, habits, poses, and inherited gestures that actors can interrupt or redirect. Through Brugh’s improvisation, vampire style becomes something performed in real time: sometimes seductive, sometimes nerdy, sometimes embarrassingly unsuccessful, and most effective when the performer leaves room for the unexpected.