In a recent interview, Jamie Campbell Bower talked about his character Vecna in Stranger Things and what it was like to play the Henry-Vecna ’dualism’.
We have reached the end. Only the last episode is missing, the grand finale of the fifth season, and we will finally find out how the saga will end Stranger Things which has kept us glued to the TV for more than ten years. In Volume 2 episodes – available at Netflix -, we discovered something more about the real intentions of Vecna/Henry/001 (Jamie Campbell Bower) and his plan to merge the reality of Hawkins with another dimension, thus creating a new world shaped according to his will. To talk di Vecna and Henry-Vecna ’dualism’ in the fifth season it was the actor himself who plays him during a recent interview.
Stranger Things, Jamie Campbell Bower talks about his character Vecna
During a recent interview given to DeadlineJamie Campbell Bower talked about his character Vecna and what it was like to play the Henry-Vecna ’dual’.
The actor recalled some fundamental passages of the fifth season such as when Henry as a child kills the scientist in the cave, revealing what it was like for him to interpret them and what he used to best realize the emotional intensity that the different scenes required:
Playing those scenes, it gave me a great liberation at times, and it was also very important for me to approach those scenes understanding the trauma and the experience to bring out that level of humanity. I’ve described Henry this season, and the way I’ve dealt with him, as sort of a memory preserve, but buried far away. So when I can discover that, bring that out, it humanizes the experience and the character for me, because there are moments where I feel wildly inhuman, monstrous, and I know it seems obvious, but really monstrous. So I took great pleasure in those moments, for sure.
Campbell Bower then recounted what it was like to interpret the Henry-Vecna ’dualism’ on an emotional level and how he managed to create this separation between the two characters:
I mean, it depends on what we mean by loss of humanity, really. Why, is it the distance from the heart, or is it monstrous in the sense of monsters? I think Henry was so close, so much closer to innocence, so much closer to the experiences, and then when he was sent to that slippery, veiny end at the end of the [stagione] 4, it all became about resentment, and at that point, it felt like humanity was gone. It seemed like the possibility of love was so far away. I refer to love as the thing that keeps us alive, and so I think Henry, if we look at it from that perspective, is close to innocence, Whatsit is further away, and Vecna is just… it’s impossible – virtually impossible – for there to be anything that feels like love.
