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How Jamie Campbell Bower & ‘Stranger Things’ Special Makeup Effects Head Barrie Gower Brought To Life The “Iconic” TV Villain Known As Vecna – The Process

When Barrie Gower was approached to serve as one of the Special Makeup Effects Department Heads for Stranger Things Season 4, who would oversee the creation of the terrifying sentient being known as Vecna, he had no concept of the degree to which the character would resonate with fans.

He came to the project after receiving “an email out fo the blue” from producer Iain Paterson, who connected him with series creators Matt and Ross Duffer as well as VFX Supervisor Michael Mayer. The Duffers were strongly drawn to Gower given his famed work on such series as Game of Thrones and Chernobyl. But they provided him up front with neither scripts for the show’s penultimate season, nor the concept art by Mayer, which would lay the foundation for Vecna’s creation.

“They didn’t really tell us the storyline, other than [Vecna was] going to be humanoid, [he was] once human, and now [he’s] been stuck in the Upside Down for the last decade or so,” Gower explains in the latest edition of Deadline’s video series, The Process. “It was a little bit of a need-to-know basis, and I don’t think they’d completely written all the scripts at that point anyway.”

What did come across to Gower from the outset was the fact that the Duffers were after “this iconic villain”—one conceived as being “90% practical”, with subtle VFX work complementing the prosthetics to follow.

“They loved our work on the Night King [from Game of Thrones], but they loved all the radiation burns and the effects that we did on Chernobyl,” says Gower, who founded the makeup company BGFX, “and [Vecna’s] almost like a combination of the two.”

Gower recently landed his sixth Emmy nomination for his work on the ’80s-set pop culture phenomenon Stranger Things, which follows a group of kids from the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana as they battle supernatural forces connected to an alternate reality known as The Upside Down. Season 4 picks up months after the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time — and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.

First introduced in Season 4, Vecna is a monster bringing The Upside Down to Hawkins who started his life as the psychokinetically gifted psychopath Henry Creel, being drawn into Hawkins National Laboratory as test subject 001 by Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) after killing his mother and sister, and framing his father for the crimes. The actor tapped for the role of Henry Creel aka One aka Vecna was Jamie Campbell Bower, who in his appearance alongside Gower on The Process details his approach to inhabiting “this very considered, very manipulative, intelligent being.”

The actor jokes at one point, “Satan was a big help.”

While it could take eight and a half hours to get Bower ready for set on any given shooting day, the actor wasn’t daunted but rather thoroughly excited to enter the series’ world with his “big bad” Vecna—”a truly iconic character,” who thanks to the efforts of Gower and the Stranger Things makeup department, “stands up against the Freddies of this world, the Pinheads of this world.”

In conversation with Bower on The Process, Gower discusses his early guesses as to who the character of Vecna might be without having seen scripts or concept art, how references gathered for Chernobyl ended up influencing his look, the “very strong, very dynamic” shapes and forms he brought to the character’s prosthetics and further inspirations taken in crafting him from the natural world. He fully breaks down the “huge, long build” and journey that went into bringing Vecna to life, from the body casting process through sculpting and up to final touches on set, and the very “few compromises” that had to be made in taking the makeup to completion, also speaking to the work that went into perfecting Vecna’s hands, crossing “the biggest part of [his] bucket list” off in getting the chance to work with Robert Englund on a key episode, the “overwhelming” response to his team’s work on Stranger Things, and Bower’s feat of endurance throughout the shoot.

Additional topics touched on include his desire from an early age to become “a monster maker”, his influential, early discovery of Fangoria magazine, the huge influence of characters like Freddy Kreuger and Pinhead on his work, art college experiences, rising through the ranks of the UK’s small makeup effects community, his big break with Game of Thrones, and his work on HBO’s recently-wrapped video game adaptation The Last of Us, as well as the second season of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series.

Bower speaks for his part to his first audition and meetings with the Duffer Brothers and early mood boards he created that would inform his portrayal of Vecna, his concerted effort to “fit into” the world the Duffers had established, in a new role, and to push for a great performance, his approach in developing Vecna’s voice and movement, the added time for preparation the Covid pandemic brought about, how he evaluates his own work, the “overwhelming gratitude” he feels for fans’ embrace of Vecna, his enjoyment of Vecna-centric memes, the challenge of pushing “energy from outside of my physical being so that it permeated through the prosthetic”, his upcoming projects and more.

Gower shares his Stranger Things Emmy nomination for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup with Special Makeup Effects Department Head Duncan Jarman, as well as Special Makeup Effects Artists Mike Mekash, Eric Garcia, Nix Herrera, Patt Foad and Paula Eden. The show this year notched 13 nominations and will contend in September for Outstanding Drama Series, with additional noms recognizing its casting, production design, hairstyling, non-prosthetic makeup, stunt performance, stunt coordination, editing, sound editing, sound mixing, special visual effects, and music supervision. Monkey Massacre Productions and 21 Laps Entertainment produce the series, which will wrap up with its upcoming fifth season. The Duffer Brothers are joined as exec producers by Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps Entertainment, as well as Iain Paterson and Curtis Gwinn.

Watch Bower’s entire conversation with Gower above.

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