Spoilers for Stranger Things season 4 follow.
Born in England to a family with ties to the music business, Jamie Campbell Bower has been a performer since childhood. He’s worked as a model and musician in addition to his acting career, which has often found him working in weird universes filled with supernatural beings, usually playing bad guys. He portrayed the powerful vampire Caius in three Twilight Saga films and the young Grindelwald in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1, a role he reprised this year in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. But he’s never been asked to play a being of undiluted malevolence quite like Vecna, the sadistic demonic being at the center of Stranger Things’ fourth season.
Only Vecna doesn’t see himself that way, which makes him a compellingly scary character, even apart from his slithering tendrils and terrifying face. The twist at the heart of Stranger Things 4 comes when Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) realizes that the sympathetic orderly who’s been helping her deal with the bullying of the other kids in the Hawkins Lab is also its first resident, the troubled, murderous, extremely powerful Henry Creel, who feels fully vindicated in his vendetta against the human race.
It’s weird to hear Vecna sounding jolly, but Bower, who spoke to GQ via phone from Morocco, sounded far from menacing as he discussed acting under pounds of prosthetics and tapping into his dark side for the role.
When you were cast in this role, you couldn’t talk about it. So what did you tell people?
Very little. I sort of toed the party line, as it were. I was like, “I’m playing the friendly orderly.” And then, “But I also can’t tell you because I’ve signed an NDA.” I was sort of giving them what I’d been told to tell as well as telling them the truth as well, which is I can’t talk about it.
So what were you told when you were reading for the part?
I wasn’t told anything. The first couple of readings that I got to do for the audition were from separate projects. One was from Hellraiser and one was from Primal Fear. When I was asked to come back, I was asked to do some dummy sides from the show. I didn’t have a full picture, but I kind of knew enough about the character, what I thought in my own mind about the character, by that point. And then when I went to go and see Matt and Ross [Duffer], and when they offered me the gig, they told me everything. And it was madness.
The part really does seem to be a midpoint between Primal Fear and Hellraiser.
A hundred percent, and I think from there… I’ve spoken about this before, but what I did when I got those two sets of sides was make this mind map, mood board, where I had Will Byers in the middle and then I had Millie and all the other characters around. And then I had the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer and then went further out from there. I felt that there’d be several iterations of the character, like he was just kind of presenting different versions of himself as the story went on.
I get the feeling that he doesn’t think of himself as evil. Was that your take on him when you were figuring out who the character was?
My thing was always that he’s kind of this righteous hand of justice and he’s there to change the world for the greater good. Which, let’s be honest: A lot of people who have done terrible things often do think that. But I think for him, given his upbringing, given his experience, given all of the things that he’s gone through, his belief system is pretty bang on, it’s pretty real. So he’s not there to just cause chaos for the sake of causing chaos. He’s there to change the world because he sees the world as a very dangerous and toxic place for him to live in, where people aren’t really themselves. And he wants to show people that it’s necessary to be yourself, I suppose, in some way.
Is it hard to be in that mindset for as long as it takes to play this character?
It’s actually really good fun. [Laughs.] To kind of dredge up the resentment and the rage is always an interesting thing. When I do that I often take time—before shooting but after shooting as well—to just be by myself and make sure that anything that’s come up has fallen away so that when I’m interacting with loved ones or another person I’m not bringing anything really nasty into any relationship that I have.
The thing for me that I actually found the most emotionally terrifying was being very nice with Eleven because I knew underneath all of this presentation of a nice person, there’s this real rage and this secret that he’s keeping that he really wants to tell her, but can’t. I just found it very nerve-wracking to be standing there, smiling, but underneath it all having this, “Oh, get me the fuck out of there,” kind of feeling. It’s weird.
He’s really quite tender with Eleven. I couldn’t always tell if he was faking it or if he really did see her as someone on his level that could come around to his side.
I think it’s a combination of the two things. I think he sees a lot of himself in her. If you get to pick it apart, she is basically his sister or potentially even his child, based on the fact that she was kind of created from him. And she’s obviously an outsider too. She’s bullied by the other kids in the lab and he felt the same way growing up. So he does look at her with a tenderness, but he’s having to toe the line in terms of existing in the lab because Brenner has obviously suppressed him, manipulated him, or tried to manipulate him, and also physically hurt him as well. We see that scene where the guards are shocking Henry with the prods and that’s not the first time that will have happened to him. So he’s learned very quickly that he has to suppress himself as well. He does hope, I think, that she would come with him, because he can relate to her and they are sort of friends.
It was interesting as well having to play with Millie, who’s a bit older. I think she was turning 17 when we first started working. But there’s the younger version of her character that I’m interacting with, which is what I’m really seeing. So when I’m working with Martie [Marie Blair], who plays the younger version of Eleven, I’m treating her a lot more like a child. I had to bring that into my interactions with Millie as well. So instead of looking at her like a 17-year-old young person, I was looking at her like she was 10 years younger. And the way we interact with children is very much like coochie-coochie-coo, everything’s lovely, aren’t you beautiful? That kind of thing.
What are the challenges doing that flat Midwestern accent?
Well, it’s funny, man. It came very, very naturally. I was always interested in how he would pronounce his consonants, his “T” sounds and things like that. I would watch a lot of news, and I found watching newscasters really interesting because they have this kind of nowhere accent, if that makes sense. They’re sort of broadly American.
Also Brenner, played by Matthew [Modine], has a sort of strange kind of Transatlantic accent going on, where his Ts are a lot harder. I thought, well, obviously that would’ve rubbed off on Henry, because he went into the lab with Brenner at a very young age
Post-Vecna, do you want to play a good guy?
No! [Laughs] I mean, look, I’m always interested in characters that have depth and something different about them. It’s those kinds of characters that I’ve always been drawn to and that I’ve always played. And more often than not, in cinema, the bad guy, as it were, is that person. So look, if that means that I have to… that I get to, not have to, that I get to play sort of the points of contention in TV and shows and movies, then: great. If it means that there’s a nice guy out there who can be equally as conflicted and can be equally as complex then equally brilliant, that’s the character I’m after. I’m not looking for something that’s surface. I don’t like it when I read a script and it’s trying to be purposefully funny. What’s the depth behind that? Come on, show me more about this person. That’s what fills me with joy.