Interviews
“Stranger Things 4”: Actor Jamie Campbell Bower on Vecna’s Physicality and Desire for Revenge [Interview]
This article contains some spoilers for “Stranger Things 4.”
Season Four of “Stranger Things” introduced a unique villain from the Upside Down in Vecna. Volume I revealed that the Mind Flayer’s general originated as family-murderer Henry Creel, who was then renamed One (001) under Dr. Brenner’s (Matthew Modine) care. It was there that One met Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), sending them both on a collision course that would spark the entire series’ dangerous encounters with the Upside Down and transform One into the imposing Vecna.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Vecna/One actor Jamie Campbell Bower in a roundtable chat after Volume 2’s release, learning more about the actor’s process in creating the villain and where Vecna’s headspace is heading into the final installment.
Special makeup effects designer Barrie Gower previously revealed the extensive, painstaking makeup application for Vecna. When asked how Bower developed Vecna’s physicality and movement and whether the heavy prosthetics informed it, Bower explained his equally extensive process.
“The physicality came quite early as I was prepping for Vecna. As far as I remember, we did a makeup test. We did the first cast for the suit sometime in the beginning of 2020, and at that point, I saw some 3D renders that Barry had gotten. I’d seen some before from Matt and Ross [Duffer], but it was all starting to click and come together. So, the first thing Barry showed me was the animatronic hand, and how that would move, just the physicality of the movement itself was something, the practicality of that.”
“When it obviously wasn’t on, I sat there, looked at my hand, and imagined my fingers coming out to here, extending upwards, so I would just sit there, stare, and feel that space a little more. Then, of course, obviously came the head, and there’s probably about that much more on top of my head,” Bower gestures inches above his head, “because it’s quite thick. Maybe not that much, but a bit more, so there’s a height difference as well, so it was about pushing the top of my skull up through the top of the prosthetic piece.”
“The walk was something that I was always very interested in, how I would hold myself and move my fingers as I was walking. I spent a lot of time walking around downtown Los Angeles, literally walking around very slowly and moving my fingers. And a stillness as well, a stillness for me was something that I found was very grounding, and I always saw Vecna and Henry as this very grounded character. He’s not wild. Although there could be moments of him exploding, I was always like, ‘No, no, he’s very, very centered,’ so it was just about making sure that I would place my feet in the right way, pushing the energy out of my own body through the prosthetic and then out of that as well.”
“You might have seen this mentioned before, but you know, for instance, the Mind Flayer set was ginormous. That was a stage, and then, we had all the green screen around, so I saw that set, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to keep pushing this out. I’ve got to keep going,’ and then, of course, also the prosthetics on the face. So, it’s about being grounded, understanding how my arm will move, how my head moves, and then overemphasizing the face so that it comes through the prosthetic, which is not natural. I would naturally try to be less rather than more, so it was a whole thing. It was just a whole thing.”
Time passes for Henry/Vecna once Eleven sends him to his doom in the Upside Down, allowing for his complete transformation from a human into a monster. Because much of that journey is off-screen, we asked Jamie Campbell Bower whether there were any discussions about what happened in that period or if the actor created his own backstory.
Bower explained that he approached this more intuitively and emotionally rather than narratively. “I think it was about building on that feeling of being isolated and sitting in that hatred. We see what he does with the Mind Flayer and how that all works, and I saw it as another opportunity for him in the same way that when he was a child being sat there with his spiders on his own. He sat there in a different location on his own, feeling the same way, dying to get out, dying to win, dying to be heard.”
“The thought process that I would often write down or that I would say to myself over and over again is, ‘You took everything from me. Now I’m going to take everything from you,’ and that is very much linked to the sensitivity that I felt like he was carrying through that period, but in terms of did he ever sit down every now and again and like a good cry, I never really went there as it were. It was more the emotional side of being isolated, and I don’t know if that comes from personal experience of being isolated, of feeling isolated. Time can be a very interesting thing, I think, when you’re in those places, or particularly for me, not you, but for me, time can pass quite quickly, and days and nights don’t seem to mean anything. They just become a bit of a blur, so I think maybe I was drawing on my own personal experience from that, and maybe that’s why it ended up being the way it was for me.”
“Stranger Things 4” ended on a foreboding note. Eleven won her fight against Vecna but didn’t wholly thwart his plans. Nor did she destroy the villain. Jamie Campbell Bower grins as he warns us about Vecna’s state of mind heading into season five; he’s out for revenge.
“He’s pissed. If you thought he wasn’t pissed before, he’s pissed now. Yeah, the vengeance, if it were me, on a personal level, if somebody did that to me, I’m coming for you.”
“Stranger Things 4” is available on Netflix now.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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