‘Stranger Things’: Inside the making of ‘Vecna 2.0’ for Season 5

This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1.

If anyone visited Jamie Campbell Bower in the days before he got the role Vecna ​​in Stranger Things they may have been alarmed by what they found.

Bauer spent this period “kind of going crazy” studying the audition materials he was given – a scene from the TV series (with fictitious character names), one from the 1996 film Primal Fear and one from the '80s horror classic Hellraiser. He then created a detective-TV-themed vision board, pinning printed images of iconic movie villains to his walls. He took Doug Bradley's Pinhead and included Voldemort, Nosferatu, Dracula and characters from The Shining, Insidious and Prince of Darkness.

Bauer, in fact, turned into a temple of villainy. But what better way to create a monster than with the most terrifying and chilling creature in the game?

He flipped through a neat folder of all the reference images that were once pinned to his walls as he sat in his Stranger Things -themed room at the Four Seasons earlier this month. Although he drew ideas and inspiration from several different characters and films, he couldn't get Bradley's work out of his head.

He wanted Vecna ​​to feel “so poised, so thoughtful and almost surgical. And Pinhead is exactly that. He doesn't run. Pinhead never runs. He knows he's always the absolute force,” Bauer said. “It's very powerful for me. I really, really like it.”

In addition to playing the monster, Bauer plays the man he once was, Henry Creel, in Stranger Things, Netflix's supernatural sensation, which has released its first batch of episodes for its series. fifth and final season Wednesday. Henry, who we first meet as a child with powerful psychokinetic abilities, evolves over the course of the series from the first child test subject at Hawkins Laboratory to the powerful Vecna ​​after being banished to the Upside Down.

As he sinks into the dark, decaying shadow dimension, he becomes less and less human in both spirit and appearance. His skin is burned by lightning, his body is engulfed in vines from top to bottom, and his left arm is mutilated. He has a deep, loud voice that is actually spoken by Bauer without any manipulation in post-production. And in season four, much of what viewers see of Vecna—the vines wrapped around his body, his mutilations and burns, the slippery texture of his skin, his striking gait and movement—was virtually removed with prosthetics, gadgets, and makeup.

Bringing Vecna ​​to life was no easy task, with a lot of interdepartmental collaboration going on behind the scenes. In the fourth season, where Vecna ​​was first introduced, the team created a full-body prosthetic based on the character's concept art, which took approximately eight hours to apply on Bauer.

But for season five, the show's creators wanted to make it “Vecna ​​on steroids,” as Stranger Things prosthetics artist Barry Gower put it.

Michael Maher Jr., a concept illustrator and visual effects supervisor who came up with the earliest versions of Vecna, said the show's creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, wanted Vecna ​​to feel more powerful this season, “but not [in] cliché, bigger and bulkier.” They also wanted the extent of his injuries in the Season 4 finale, when his opponents set him on fire, shot him multiple times and sent him flying out of a second-story window, to be clear.

Maher said he was sculpting to come up with a new version of the character when he accidentally punched a hole in the figure's torso. However, it was a happy moment; He felt that Vecna ​​2.0 could be both more open and edgy. According to Maher, the vines wrapped around his body now resemble Medusa near his head and shoulders and essentially act as armor.

His mutilated arm and hand, already terrifying with the long fingers and sharp claws he brought close to the faces of his victims, now stretch out as if he had become one with the Upside Down's vines.

Due to the refined look of Vecna ​​in the final season, a combination of practical and visual effects were used to achieve the final look. Gower called it “a really beautiful marriage” between the two. The monster's head, shoulders, and right arm were made from prosthetics, but otherwise Bauer wore a spandex suit with a printed design of Vecna's body from Season 4, which served as a reference for the visual effects team. Bauer also wore foam inserts under the arms to convey the creature's gait and wide stance.

Gower said that with all the moving parts and elements of Vecna's body that they wanted to change for the new season, practically speaking it would have been a “logistical nightmare.” Early in the process, Gower says he and Maher's teams held lengthy discussions to avoid overbuilding the prosthetics. Creating a new image took about three months.

When the Duffer Brothers and Maher initially talked about Vecna's design, they drew on Pinhead and Freddy Krueger in the same way that Bauer did for his performance. According to Maher, the creatives used classic '80s films for a “nostalgic quality,” but he was challenged to create something that still felt fresh and reflected the power of Vecna. He wanted to make it clear that Vecna ​​was “a character who is basically strong in his mind, who really resonates as a villain,” he said.

By 2019, as the concept art process progressed, the Duffer brothers approached Gower, whose work on Game of Thrones and Chernobyl they admired. Gower has a young daughter who was an avid Stranger Things fan at the time, and he said he couldn't turn down the opportunity. Even before Bower was cast in the role, Gower and his team began a roughly five-month process (barring a pause in production due to the pandemic) to develop the Vecna ​​hardware. The complete suit consisted of approximately 26 overlapping prosthetic pieces that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Gower and his team used latex foam, which is lightweight and opaque, to cover large parts of Vecna's body, mainly his left arm and lower body. Silicone-based materials were used for its face, soldiers, chest, back, and right arm, as the material is transparent and can be colored to match the creature's skin pigment. Gower says it's difficult to paint two different materials and make them look like one, but the artists he's worked with are “incredible artists,” some of whom are classically trained.

Gower said that despite all the logistics involved in creating Vecna, Bauer was patient and cooperative—whether it was calls at 2 a.m. asking for prosthetics to be applied before he was called on the shoot, or adjustments Gower's team had to make as those long shooting days progressed. Gower also praised not only Bauer's endurance, but also his commitment to performing.

Bauer described the “goth folk, black metal” music he played while sitting in his makeup chair, which became faster and more hardcore as it progressed. Gower said that at the beginning of the hours-long statement, Bauer was joking and being himself. But as they got closer to the end, they “started to lose Jamie.”

“Vecna's voice would begin to be heard,” Gower said. “Towards the end of the trial, Vecna ​​spoke to us. It was no longer Jamie.”

“I really can’t imagine Vecna ​​being as successful, as iconic a villain and as a character, without Jamie Campbell Bower,” Gower continued. “He's incredible.”

Becoming Vekna can be exhausting both mentally and physically due to the prosthetics and the dark place the actor has to go to. But Bauer said he's finding it even more difficult to play Henry, Vecna's human form, this season.

In his opinion, Vecna ​​is devoid of all humanity, but when he plays Henry, there are still “elements of humanity” present even though his intentions are pure evil. Incl. In the first episode, we see Henry targeting the Hawkins children, but instead of introducing himself as Vecna ​​as he did in season four, he approaches his victims with a friendly, well-dressed appearance – they call him Mr. Whatsit.

“There was probably something more frightening about having enough self-control to allow someone else to make a bad choice,” Bauer said. It's a fun puzzle for him: figuring out how much emotion to show and when to let the mask slip from the audience, he added.

Compared to the monsters Bauer used to create Vecna, he considered one person to be the inspiration for Henry in season five: Mister Rogers.

He is a wolf in sheep's clothing. And Bauer promises we'll see more wolves as the season goes on, although he's careful not to give too much away.