Season 4 of Stranger Things was the darkest and scariest of them all, and that was due to the storyline of the villainous Vecna, eerily portrayed by Jamie Campbell Bower.
The character started out as Henry Creel, a young and troubled resident of Hawkins, who was seen by Dr. Martin Brenner, who took Henry to Hawkins National Laboratory to be studied. There he was designated 001, becoming the laboratory’s first child test subject, long before Eleven came on the scene.
Jamie Campbell Bower did a fantastic job of bringing this creep to life, but the role, along with his other antagonist roles as Grindelwald in the Harry Potter films, one of the Volturi in the Twilight series, and more, have taken their toll on him.
During a fan event for MegaCon Orlando, The Mortal Instruments actor admitted that he had discussions with his therapist about the mental toll of playing the hair-raising character, introduced in last season’s decidedly more PG-13 plotline.
He told the crowd, “It’s funny. I was talking to my therapist the other day.” This reportedly prompted a laugh from the crowd, but Bower said that he was “dead serious… I’m not lying.”
He went on, “We were going through some stuff, and he was like, ‘We really need to make sure that you carve out time for you whenever you’re working next.’ I turned around to him, and I was like, ‘Yeah, to be honest with you, man, I just don’t think I’ll be doing another bad guy for a minute.’ Like, it f—s me up. I’m dead serious.”
Bower, of course, maintained that he was grateful for the role, saying, “It’s been amazing, and it’s been an incredible journey, to join the show from season 4, to be part of something that so many people love and something that I loved as well and still love. But I definitely am ready to hang up the foam latex and wish him a slippery farewell.”
There is no release date yet for the fifth and last season of the beloved series, but creators and executive producers Matt and Ross Duffer teased to Deadline recently that the installment will their most ambitious spectacle yet, likening the experience to making “eight blockbuster movies.”
“We think it’s our most personal story,” Matt Duffer said. “It was super intense and emotional to film — for us and for our actors. We’ve been making this show together for almost 10 years. There was a lot of crying. There was so much crying. The show means so much to all of us, and everyone put their hearts and souls into it. And we hope — and believe — that passion will translate to the screen.”
via: Deadline
