After five seasons across nearly 10 years, “Stranger Things” reached its grand finale in 2025 as the monster-hunting, D&D-loving party took on the show’s big bad, Vecna, for one last time.
Making Vecna a credible, terrifying threat took a lot of teamwork, with actor Jamie Campbell Bower, prosthetics designer Barrie Gower and casting director Carmen Cuba putting their heads together on how to create a finale-worthy villain.
“It really was just such an incredibly amazing, collaborative team effort that I personally feel so grateful and lucky to have been able to be a part of,” Bower told TheWrap in a new installment of “How I Did It,” presented by Netflix.
Cuba first found Bower during the casting process for Season 4, introducing audiences to the “five-star general” of “Stranger Things” and the Upside Down. She had a few parameters for the role: Cuba needed someone tall, an actor who could play multiple characters at once and make them feel distinctly terrifying.
“I knew it was two characters at that point. I don’t think we knew the third character yet. We saw a lot of actors doing both things. For his role, we saw like 177 people,” Cuba told TheWrap. “We talked about the voice pretty early, right away, because, as you can tell, he’s a very thoughtful actor, and so he was thinking very intensely about it from the beginning.”
Cuba also needed someone willing to sit in the makeup chair for a long period of time. Gower, who joined the series with Bower during Season 4, upped the prosthetics game for “Stranger Things 5,” giving Vecna a new look reflective of the time he’s spent licking his wounds in the Upside Down (and the newly-discovered Abyss). The Duffer Brothers described the upgrade, Gower said, as “Vecna on steroids.”
“I remember our first day back on Season 5, it was putting Jamie into his full prosthetic makeup, and it was bizarre because it was exactly the same room with exactly the same people and with the same makeup. It was almost like riding a bike,” he told TheWrap. “I think there’s something really lovely about that familiarity.”
But Gower and his team needed to be careful not to overdo it with the makeup. Gower wanted to make sure that Bower’s acting didn’t get lost under too many prosthetics.
“We decided that the most important thing was going to be Jamie’s performance and that we could totally see all his delivery and his lines and his movement and his head and shoulders, so we did full practical makeup for Jamie’s head and shoulders, his right arm as well, because they were concerned he needed to be able to have a lot of dexterity with his right arm,” Gower said. “It was really important that we were able to let the actor have enough movement and portray what they need to through the prosthetics and have enough facial movement.”
“It was just an absolute gift, working with Jamie,” he added.
Bower was already experienced in playing multiple shades of the same character. In “Stranger Things 4,” the actor played both Vecna and Henry, a younger version of the show’s big bad before he was physically altered after being banished to the Abyss by Eleven. “Stranger Things 5” would bring Bower a third shade to this character: Mr. Whatsit, a friendly-seeming figure luring the children of Hawkins to a hidden world so he can use them in his quest to make worlds collide.
The addition of Mr. Whatsit brought Cuba something of a full-circle moment for “Stranger Things.” Nearly a decade after she found a slew of child actors (including Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin and Noah Schnapp) to lead the fantasy/sci-fi/horror series, Cuba needed to find a whole new crew of kids to make up the younger Hawkins crew.
“The ones who are right for it present themselves much sooner than sometimes adults. The Duffers really enjoy watching auditions, and they start shaping the character via auditions that they see and then sort of as we home in on the person that is the right fit for the part,” Cuba said. “Then they start writing to the character, which then makes it look like I did a spectacular job, because they really just ended up writing to the best of what the kids that we cast brought.”
Many of these additions to the “Stranger Things” world mostly shared the screen with one actor: Bower. The actor said being the lone adult in scenes filled with child actors was scary in its own right.
“Kids have this ability, this kind of innate ability, to be able to kind of see through lies, and when I stepped into Season 4, you know, nobody really knew who I was. They weren’t given the full story, they weren’t given the full scripts, and I felt like I knew more than anybody else, which is a good position to be in,” Bower said. “With Season 5, everyone was very aware of who I am, so making sure that that warmth and that that character that I built was able to remain in the face of the human lie detector test was very challenging for me. I spent a long time worrying about it for sure. However, they also brought this immense sense of light and levity to the process for me.”
“Stranger Things” Seasons 1-5 are now streaming on Netflix.
