He’s the strangest thing.
Netflix’s sci-fi hit “Stranger Things,” now streaming all five seasons, has Henry, aka Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), as its big baddie.
Viewers joked that Vecna got a trendy Ozempic glow up, like all the celebs. Barrie Gower, the show’s prosthetic makeup designer, exclusively told The Post, “For Vecna’s return in Season 5, [series creators Matt and Ross Duffer] wanted him to have evolved from his look in the previous season.”
“The threat needed to be greater, and the stakes higher.”
To play Vecna, Campbell Bower disappeared behind prosthetics makeup that covered him in a skull-like look, with his skin appearing to be made of veins and vines.
Gower explained that to achieve his Season 5 appearance, “We completely re-sculpted the head and arm prosthetics, making the roots prouder, creating more significant shapes,” in the veins and vines.
He added, “They also wanted us to include areas of burnt, charred skin, that connected us to his final scene in Season 4 where he was engulfed in flames as he fell from the window of the Creel house.”
Set in the ‘80s in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, “Stranger Things” followed a central group of friends and family including Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) Steve (Joe Keery), Joyce (Winona Ryder) and more as they battled the sinister Vecna and his monstrous minions.
“The application process was very challenging in Season 4. Jamie wore around 25 overlapping prosthetic appliances that took a team of four artists around 7 hours to apply everyday, we’d then spend 12 hours on set maintaining the look all day, then a 2 hour derig at the end of the day,” Gower explained.
For the fifth and final season, after they updated his look, “the application process was shorter, due to less coverage of prosthetics. But, a main challenge was to figure out how to keep Jamie’s stance / gate to mirror the same position as the final on screen character.”
They created “a skin tight lycra body suit,” he said, “with large foam pads either side of his chest below his arm pits. This prevented him from dropping his arms to his sides and always keeping them in an aggressive pose.”
Season 5 also changed how many of the special effects on Vecna were practical versus digital.
In Season 4, Gower explained, the actor wore prosthetics “covering his entire body, which was subtly enhanced with digital movement in post production. The main reason for this was to keep as much human physicality as possible.”
The Duffer brothers had wanted Campbell Bower’s performance “to be very present.”
He explained that in Season 5, Vecna’s look changed to be “bigger [and] more mutated.”
“His body is less humanoid now, almost made of a mass of thick, twisting vines. He had a lot of ‘negative space’ — areas where you could see straight through him.”
Because of that change, Season 5 used more digital effects for Vecna’s body, “and we concentrated on head and shoulder prosthetics, also his lower right arm. This ensured we still had Jamie’s performance, especially in the scenes driven by his dialogue.”
Gower has also worked on other shows like “The Last of Us,” “The Witcher” and “Game of Thrones.”
The latter helped him prepare for “Stranger Things.”
When he was first approached to join, he and his team heard that the Duffers wanted a character “that could have a similar presence to the ‘Night King,’” the famous “Game of Thrones” villain that Gower and his team designed.
“We did many full body makeups on ‘Game of Thrones,’ which put us in a good place for creating Vecna’s look,” he told The Post.
“Not only did this help us with the technical approach — how we would sculpt and process the prosthetic appliances, it also prepared us for the stamina our team would require for the makeup application, and the challenges that would bring.”
