Stranger Things antagonist Vecna’s death scene in the finale of the Netflix series brings to light the dreaded monster’s human side, actor Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays the role of Vecna in the hit sci-fi show, said in a recent interview.
“As I’m coughing up this bile, yes, I’m coughing, but the feeling that I want to convey and the words that I’m trying to get out are just, ‘Please don’t,’ It was one of the more human moments of playing Vecna,” Bower told Netflix’s companion site Tudum.
The final episode of Season 5 of the sci-fi series shows the Hawkins gang, led by Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), killing their archenemy Vecna, aka Henry Creel, aka Mr. Whatsit. However, before Vecna dies and is decapitated by Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), he faces his fears, reliving his most traumatic memory that changed his life forever.
“I’m chasing Holly through the desert, and she runs into this mine shaft, which represents a repressed memory of a traumatic experience for Henry, the reason his whole life ended up the way it has. He finds a briefcase with a black rock that pours into his hand and changes everything. It’s the reason he lost his youth, his childhood, his love, his heart,” Bower shared.
“I felt like I’ve been wanting to protect him all this time because I felt like all the people just hate him. And it was in that moment that I was like, ‘Now you see. Now you see why I am’,” he added.
Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer introduced Vecna as the supervillain from a parallel dimension in Season 4 of the Netflix show. But before he became Vecna, he was Henry Creel, the first test subject at Dr. Brenner’s (Matthew Modine) Hawkins Lab.
In Season 5, Vecna disguises himself as Mr. Whatsit, a 1950s-styled gentleman who becomes an imaginary friend to Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) younger sister Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) and the town’s other unsuspecting children, luring twelve of them to his mindscape to help him carry out his monstrous acts.
In an earlier interview with entertainment news magazine People, Bower had revealed that it took an average of seven hours per day to apply prosthetic pieces to his entire body. The team relied on physical effects rather than digital effects for the character, except for CGI that made the vines on Vecna's body move.
Also starring Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Sadie Sink, and Caleb McLaughlin, Stranger Things Season 5 finale is streaming on Netflix.