The whole world knows Jamie Campbell Bower’s name, and it isn’t for his role as young Gellert Grindelwald in the Harry Potter film franchise or Caius Volturi in the Twilight saga. Bower is most familiar far and wide for his portrayal of Henry Creel/One/Vecna on Netflix’s hit science-fiction horror series Stranger Things. After enduring eight hours per day in the makeup trailer, Bower transformed from a handsome Englishman into an unholy monstrosity.
While this doesn’t sound all that familiar, there’s a similar theme at play here in an entirely different franchise, which bares no similarities to Stranger Things besides its main antagonist, Anakin Skywalker, alias Darth Vader. If you haven’t already guessed it, that franchise is the illustrious Star Wars.
As the mysteries of Stranger Things 4 began to unfold, we discovered that Henry Creel, son of Victor Creel (Robert Englund’s character), possesses the same psychokinetic powers as Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven. Moreover, Creel meets Dr. Martin Brenner, known to us as “Papa,” and becomes an illegal child experiment called One. From there, One becomes corrupt with power and encounters young Eleven, who banishes him to the Upside Down, where he absorbs the Mind Flayer (the Red Herring for the show’s Big Bad) and becomes Vecna — the overlord equivalent to the other dimension.
In Hayden Christensen’s case, he transforms from a dashing Canadian into one of the most iconic villains in pop culture history — with Vecna hot on his heels. Originally, Anakin is a Jedi prophesied to balance the Force, but Chancellor Sheev Palpatine/Darth Sidious lures him to the dark side, where he adopts the Darth Vader mantle and becomes a Sith Lord. While Christensen has become the face of Vader, it was Jake Lloyd who portrayed Anakin as a child in The Phantom Menace, the first film in the prequel trilogy. Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader has been compared to Henry’s metamorphosis into Vecna, but Reddit has pegged Vecna as more of a Lord Voldemort copycat than anything else.
Without finding a more suitable counterpart, Henry Creel has been deemed far worse, given that he never actually cared about anyone other than himself — not even his own family — whereas Anakin loved others before Darth Sidious coerced him to the dark side. Arguably, Henry was evil from the start, attempting to commit homicide against his entire family, and he would have succeeded, had Victor not been saved when Henry fell into a self-induced coma. Anakin, on the other hand, wasn’t inherently evil and become evil over time due to a sense of loss and abandonment. Henry kills people without rhyme, reason or remorse, while Anakin was the victim of corruption and misguidance.
So, perhaps Vecna is more akin to Voldemort than Vader. They both have no nose, so that’s something to bond over.