Spoiler alert for Season 4, Vol.2 of Stranger Things.
After three seasons of Demogorgons and Mind Flayers, Stranger Things 4 finally gave its characters—and viewers—a villain from the Upside Down with motivations and impulses that were easier to understand in Vecna, the humanoid creature who preys upon people’s darkest fears.
A new featurette video on YouTube showcases how the Stranger Things costuming and effects team were able to transform actor Jamie Campbell Bower into the monstrous Vecna. As one of the effects supervisors explains: “Rather than having a rubber monster suit, we were designing it as a kind of jigsaw puzzle, which gives us a lot more fluid movements, we don’t have much buckling, and we have a really skintight sort of look.”
Bower himself recalls that when he first tried out for the role of Henry/Vecna/One, he was unaware that he would essentially be portraying two different versions of the same character, or that it would involve being completely concealed in prosthetics, and that much of his performance would rely on his voice.
“When I got the audition through for this show, I was given two sets of sides,” he says. “One was from Primal Fear, and the other set of sides was from Hellraiser… [The Duffer Brothers] told me about the character, and they kept on saying ‘oh we love your voice, we love your voice,’ and I was thinking ‘what do you mean, you love my voice?'”
The entire process of becoming Vecna was a workday in itself, with the prosthetics taking eight hours to apply, and a further two hours to remove after filming was completed. Once all of the makeup and latex were in place, the costume was enhanced with CGI so that the final look is a combination of practical and digital effects.
The overall result was so effective that Millie Bobby Brown, who plays the young superheroine Eleven, didn’t even realize it was Bower at first and became visibly upset the first time they filmed a scene together.
“I walked up to her [as Vecna] and she burst into tears,” he said. “She wouldn’t look at me and she was visibly just disgusted by the whole thing… After she cried and I made it obvious that she knew it was me, one of the things she said was that, ‘I knew it was you when I could smell cigarettes,’ because I’m a smoker.”
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