Jamie Campbell Bower has Vecna soundtrack
Stranger Things star Jamie Campbell Bower relies on certain songs to help get into character as Vecna.
Jamie Campbell Bower relied on music to help "build" his Stranger Things character Vecna.
The 37-year-old actor portrays the antagonist and his past incarnations Henry Creel and One and he's told how there are particular pieces of "dark" music that help him get into the mindset of the mysterious villain.
He told Deadline: "I draw great inspiration from music. It’s one of those things, I think we all know where we were when we first heard certain songs and how we were feeling when we heard them.
" But, for this show, particularly, I really did use music to help build this character. There’s a level of meditation, I suppose, that comes with being in this character.
"I found myself in a world of much darker, sound-scapey, meditative music like Sano, a lot of folk, black metal music artists like Chelsea Wolfe, and then on the heavier side of things as well.
"I mean, I’ve referenced it before, but bands like Norma Jean were inspirational for me in creating this character.
"So it’s always been there for me throughout the process of making this, and this season was no different.
"It was nice to be able to put on certain albums and go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know where I am. I know what I need to do.' "
Despite his dramatic physical transformation as Vecna, Jamie insisted it is "fun" to work with prosthetics, costume and make-up departments.
He said: "So this season, for sure, is definitely more of a collaboration across departments, which for me, was really fun actually, because obviously I loved the full body process for Season 4. It was fabulous. It’s not something you get to do often as an actor.
"I love Barry Gower and the whole team at BGFX, and they’re just amazing. Barry’s a friend, and I’m working with him at the moment, but this season, what you’re seeing is predominantly prosthetics, from sort of here upwards. The hand is prosthetic…but I’m wearing a morph suit that’s painted in vines as well.
"Within that, I was able to have discussions with multiple departments about certain things that I wanted to have just to make sure that the presence and the scale and just this sheer, I don’t know, kind of size of him was still imposing. If we’d been shooting this over a space of three years, and I’d had a year to sort of go huge and then another year to slim down again, I would have loved to have done that, but we didn’t.
"So I remember speaking to Barry after we did our first fitting with the makeup and saying to him, ‘What would be great is if we can just increase the size of the shoulders. So maybe let’s think about using something like American football pads, just to make sure that he’s still imposing when I’m stood facing off against another person.’ "
Jamie - who also had six-inch huge lifts in his shoes to make him seem even more imposing - was all too happy to shoot his own scenes rather than relying on digital effects.
He said: "What you’re seeing on screen with regards to the way he moves, what he’s doing, how he’s moving, that’s all me still underneath, underneath the CG, even to the point where, before he comes out in in the fourth episode of 5, we see him in silhouette behind the membrane.
"It was one of those things where they’re like, ‘Well, we could do it either with a double or we could just do it in post or whatever. But it would be great to have you, because you move in a certain way.’
"I was like, ‘Well, of course I’ll be there. It’s my job. I love being here.’ So it was cool. It was a different process entirely."
