There’s something about Vecna in Stranger Things season four that makes him more of a compelling villain than all the adversaries the Hawkins gang has faced put together.
Maybe it’s the prosthetics. Perhaps it’s his deep and booming voice. Or, it could be Jamie Campbell Bower’s sweat-inducing performance that never fails to give us the hackles. Either way, Vecna is a villain for the history books, and he isn’t done by a long shot.
During a recent talk with The Hollywood Reporter, Jamie revealed that the reaction you see from Millie Bobby Brown when she and Vecna are squaring off in the finale is genuine and that she was really crying due to Vecna’s scary and looming presence.
“Yes. She was terrified and freaked out. And Caleb [Heymann], our DP, was very smart and saw that she was having this reaction in the beginning of rehearsal and decided to shoot her first. It’s so pure and beautiful. It was lovely to have this battle, this epic battle as it were, but it’s drawn out. It’s so much more elongated than it is in the Volume 1 finale. There is this back and forth of power-sharing. And each actor has their own way of being their own character. So to be able to play and, having worked with Mills and having worked with Sadie, to just know internally what needed to be done for each of them to let me feel like I was doing the right thing, was really fun.”
“Beautiful” is a word that Henry/Vecna/One has constantly used to terrorize Hawkins over the past season, so Campbell Bower might be getting a bit too method with this role.
All jokes aside, Bower has recently teased fans by saying that Vecna isn’t licking his wounds but rebuilding for the final push against Hawkins and the rest of the real world, and we can’t wait for the ensemble to return in the fifth and final season to finish this ambitious tale sometime in the near future.
Years and years of experience living with these stories tell us the team will inevitably defeat Vecna, bringing about a happy ending, but how happy is a question that excites and frightens us at the same time.