Steven Prusakowski
In the often horrifying world of Stranger Things, few characters have burrowed into our psyche quite like Vecna. Portrayed by Jamie Campbell Bower, he isn’t just a monster, he’s a tragic architect of chaos, born the tragic soul of Henry Creel. As the Netflix series heads to its finale, breaking viewing records along the way, Bower’s portrayal grows deeper, blending practical prosthetics with world-bending CGI to create a villain that’s so horrifying it is easy to forget he was once human.
This season unleashed a new slimmer designed Vecna, the grotesque skull-like faced demon covered in decaying vines and his alterego, the human fedora-wearing “Mr. Whatsit” alter ego using his Sunday school charms luring kids into his grips. For Bower it requires both a physical performance and a cerebral one as well. The actor spoke with Awards Radar (full video interview below) about his transformation infusing Henry/Vecna with layers of eerie charm, drawing inspiration from the least expected of places, iconic figures.
Bower doesn’t just slap on the prosthetics to become Vecna (part of a grueling seven-to-eight-hour process that has thankfully for the actor trimmed down this season), he fuels the character and his performance with references that humanize the horror. For Vecna’s core fuel Bowers “I found Vecna, it would be a shame if Vecna’s motivation was just, you know, I don’t know, just evil, just evil, you know, there’s no, there is no humanity there for me,” Bower explains.
Instead, he built the character starting from Vecna and working backward to Henry, arriving at “this idea of resentment. Resentment being this sort of choking of love, as it were, and then tracked back to Henry. His childhood, his experiences at home and then, obviously, his experiences within Hawkins National Lab.” The resentment crystallized at a pivotal moment, “when he says, ‘You and I, Eleven, we can make a better world, we can have freedom,’’ and she says ‘No’, she eventually ends up sending him into his sort of veiny demise, as it were. At that point, that’s where the resentment lies.”
This allows Bower to portray Vecna by “holding on to some of those sort of his less desirable human characteristics, as well as being able to bury the memory of self back in the mind, so that it can pop up, but that it’s not always there.”
Ultimately, Bower connects deeply with the character’s vulnerability. “Ultimately, how I feel about this character at the end of the day is I just want to give them a hug. That is genuinely what I want to do.” He spent time “considering his relationships with his primary caregivers,” and between seasons, seeing Stranger Things: The First Shadow play in London and New York “qualified” his thoughts, confirming “the things that I’ve been looking at and thinking about are actually real and part of this lore.” For Bower, it comes down to “being able to connect to the vulnerable side of whatever character it is that you’re playing,” leaning into nurture over nature to “feel their heart a little bit more.”
Playing Henry this season, particularly as the creepily deceptive “Mr. Whatsit,” demanded a different approach. “This is a presentation,” Bower noted. “This is not what we saw in season four with regards to the fact that what you were seeing in season four actually happened and is a real experience. This version of Henry is what can I show this person that’s in front of me that’s going to help them to make them feel safe and ultimately provide me with the success of my end goal.” He created mood boards and drew from unexpected inspirations. “I leaned into people like Mr. Rogers this season particularly. I used a bit of Willy Wonka and wanted that sort of eerie, but everything’s quite niceness about what’s going on. I stuck those things all around my house so that they were the first things that I saw when I woke up and the last things I saw when I went to sleep as well.”
He also referenced a 1950s film with a Pied Piper-like sequence of leading children into a colorful cave world, plus a stalker film called Alone for the “I’ve been watching you” element, learning victims’ likes to use against them and manipulate them. The actor’s choices infuse the human version with an unsettling charm, a familiarity that disarms his victims as he puts them under his spell. “I wanted to slip things in during the shooting of this season, things like what I want to say, I wanted to say, ‘Welcome everyone.’ It’s just minor, you know, little little moments that I just thought, oh, that’s really fun.”
Through the buried memories of Henry’s past and Bower’s push to tap into the broken soul beneath Vecna, Bower brings humanity to the figure defined by horror. In Bower’s hands, the monster and the man remain linked. As we head into the final minutes of this 10 year adventure, expect the final showdown with Vecna/Henry and the gang in Hawkins to be one for the ages.
Watch my full interview (below) with Jamie Campbell Bower below with insight into his work, his preparation for Vecna, why he like being first in set, and bonding with the cast.
The finale of Stranger Things plans to close out 2025 with a bang, premiering its final episode on Netflix at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT – New Years Eve.
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