Jamie Campbell Bower on Building Vecna From the Inside Out for “Stranger Things” Season 5
Since appearing in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, British actor Jamie Campbell Bower has starred in numerous fantasy productions. He played King Arthur in the television show Camelot, the vampire lord Caius for the Twilight films, the Shadowhunter Jace in The Mortal Instruments, and the sorcerer Grindelwald in the Harry Potter franchise. Of course, Bower is probably best known for his portrayal of Vecna, the supernatural antagonist from the Emmy-winning Netflix series Stranger Things.
Bower joined the cast of Stranger Things for Season 4 (2022) as the extraordinary man Henry, who undergoes a hideous transformation into Vecna, named after the undead archwizard from Dungeons & Dragons. Reprising the role for Season 5 (2025), Bower depicts Henry/Vecna as he executes his most sinister and ambitious scheme, sometimes in the guise of the gentlemanly Mr. Whatsit. Midway through the fifth and final season, Bower made a surprise appearance onstage as Henry in the Tony-winning prequel Stranger Things: The First Shadow, to the delight of the audience that night on Broadway.
Bower met with The Credits to share reflections on Stranger Things and his career to date. He explained how he started acting in a London living room. He shared remarks on the fantasy genre. Most generously, Bower discussed the challenges of playing Vecna, from using the marvelous prosthetics by Barrie Gower and his Emmy-winning team to finding the humanity that still lingered inside the monstrous Vecna.
Can you tell us how you first got interested in acting?
Absolutely. Like many kids, I would put on performances for my parents in our living room with my best friend, who is now also an actor. Then, we left London when I was 8 or 9. My parents had seen this natural inclination for performance within me, so I joined my local youth theater. I was really supported there by the people who ran that local youth theater company, encouraged, and given confidence and opportunity. I owe so much of my career to them. The theater was the thing I loved the most. It was where I felt the safest. It was where I got to explore myself.
The fantasy genre is very prominent among your acting credits. Compared to other genres, would you say that fantasy presents any distinctive challenges and opportunities?
What I really like about fantasy in general is that it can often be a beautiful opportunity to show us how we could be. It’s not necessarily utopia, but often, it comes to a very beautiful end. I’ve been so lucky to work on some amazing projects in the fantasy world, and I’m always delighted and blown away when I get to walk onto a sound stage, and the set design is just overwhelmingly gorgeous. So, does fantasy present challenges for me? No, it presents great challenges to the art department! But I’m always so moved and just shocked. In Stranger Things, for the Pain Tree at the end of Season 5, the artists sculpted each of those bones that are coming out of the sand by hand. They’re only four feet long, and they all come together at the end. I could never, ever, ever be able to understand how to do that.
Speaking of artists’ work, it took considerable time to apply the prosthetics. How did you occupy your mind while you sat in that makeup chair?
I would read a little to begin with, because I had use of my face for the first hour, or I would do a Sudoku. But listening to music was generally the thing that we would do the most. I had a pretty concise playlist of music that I had either listened to on my own while I was creating Vecna in my mind, or, that I had added to the playlist over time.
What do you do differently as an actor when you’re bringing to life a role that requires so much in the way of prosthetics?
Quite a bit! First and foremost, I did the fitting with Barrie [Gower] in January 2020. We had a read-through in mid-March, and then, of course, the world shut down. I remember thinking at the time about the simplicity of gait. How was I going to walk? How was I going to be in this suit? Was it going to be restrictive? Thankfully, it wasn’t restrictive. We all know when we walk into a room, and we feel small. We also all know when we walk into a room and feel big, present, and powerful. I’ve got to do that, but I’ve also got to do that through however many millimeters of foam latex that are going to be on top of me. It is about where you hold yourself and where you push your energy out of. We all carry a sort of energy around us, but I wanted to make sure that it was going through the foam latex, so that it was present. I remember Barrie, when we tried the hand on, gave me these rubber bands to exercise my hand. I went, “Oh, no, no, I’m alright, I play guitar.” And I was alright, which was funny. This was my first time wearing heavy prosthetics, and obviously, with Henry, I worked so hard on these very minute details within his eyes and within his face. I needed to carry them over into Vecna as well, but I did have to work just a little bit harder in my facial muscles to be able to do it. Those were the logistical things. Of course, there is the more monstrous element of it as well. You don’t want this to be a character who is just being evil for the sake of it.
Over the course of Stranger Things, we discover that Vecna is more than just an embodiment of evil, as he may initially appear to be. How do you create a villain who is simultaneously terrifying but also, at least at times, vulnerable?
Understanding the vulnerability. Holding space for the innocence, holding space for his experience. I spent a long time thinking about Henry’s early childhood. And it’s something that, fortunately, I was able to see. Between Seasons 4 and 5, the play came out, and I had a lot of ideas qualified for me. In the play, we see Virginia, Henry’s mother, hit him. If that’s happened once, it’s happened multiple times. That’s going to affect a small boy. Also, in Season 5, this is a kid who, like so many kids, was inquisitive, went exploring, and came across something he shouldn’t have, which took his childhood away. It’s being able to feel that, that is the building blocks to creating something that is multidimensional and has layers and doesn’t just become this evil-for-evil ’s-sake thing.
From the perspective of acting craft, did you do anything to try to differentiate each persona of Henry, like Vecna, Henry, and Mr. Whatsit?
The Mr. Whatsit stuff was the stuff I struggled with the most. We’d had this really large manifesto in Season 4: The world is a lie, and everyone in it is just performing, and I don’t believe that. Then, I come to Season 5, and all of a sudden, I’m lying to a bunch of kids. How do I morally grapple with that, within the morality of the character that I know of? I had to come to the realization and the understanding that this was (A) a presentation and (B) a possession. He was a host. There were still moments when the reality of Henry came through. There were things that I definitely thought about, wrote about, considered, and picked apart. With Season 4, I built this mood board that I stuck on my wall. It was full of other film references, real people, and images, building up his story and his world so that I would wake up, look at it, and know exactly who I was. So for Season 5, when I was trying to understand Mr. Whatsit, I pulled the core memories out of that mood board, put them in the middle, and then built all the way around outside of it. Visual references and music are really important to me. So yes, there were things that I did, and it was just kind of diving into the madness basically.
Featured image: STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. (L-R) Mike Mekash (Co-Dept. Head, Makeup) and Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna behind the scenes of Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. Niko Tavernise/Netflix © 2024
