Vecna wants to bring “righteous justice” to the world of Stranger Things

The fourth season of Stranger Things has a lot to recommend it: the story is more ambitious than ever, the episodes are super-sized, the effects are great, etc. But the star of the show this time around is Vecna, a Freddy Krueger-esque new villain who is murdering the kids of Hawkins from his stronghold in the Upside Down.

Although he’s not just inspired by Freddy Krueger. According to actor Jamie Campbell Bower, there was also a lot of Pinhead, Christopher Lee as Dracula, and any given villain from Stephen King in the mix. “Voldemort was obviously on my mood board as well,” he told TV Guide.

Bower played Vecna under all that makeup and prosthetics, but he also played a different version of the character…SPOILERS beyond this point!

Vecna was partially inspired by Voldemort

So the big twist of the season is that Vecna is the same orderly who helped out Eleven when she was being experimented on in Hawkins Lab. Before that, he was 001, the first psychic child in Dr. Martin Brenner’s program. And before that, he was Henry Creel, who murdered his mother and sister and maimed his father before coming into Dr. Brenner’s care.

“Keeping my mouth closed was very, very difficult,” Bower said about keeping his role a secret. “It was crazy. I think also, given the character description that was given to people when I was first cast as well. It was always, ‘Oh my God, you’re doing Stranger Things! You will be playing Peter, Peter Ballard is a caring man who works at the mental institution.’ That was always very, very difficult. I just shied away from talking about it full stop, realistically.”

It must be nice to have it all out in the open now, especially given how much Bower enjoyed becoming this character:

"It felt amazing. It felt incredible. I knew I was going to have to be wearing this very cumbersome prosthetic, but I needed to be able to kind of feel the character before putting it on. So I did a lot of work personally just at home, walking around the streets of Los Angeles, feeling out the character. I knew my fingers were going to be really long… Actually, I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t told anyone. The day that I got the job, or the day after — and I haven’t seen this since — I was walking around downtown Los Angeles and there was a guy who passed me wearing a Vecna D&D t-shirt. I have not seen one since and I had never seen one before and I was like, “Oh shit, okay.” But yeah, the prosthetics were amazing. It’s such a treat to play what I hope is quite an iconic figure in popular culture. We’ll see."

He’s on his way, I’d say.

The connection between Vecna and Eleven

We watch as One helps out Eleven when she’s having difficulty at the lab; as will happen again when she gets older, the other kids are picking on her. “I think he sees a lot of himself in her,” Campbell Bower said. “That’s one of the main things is that she, like him, is an outsider. She’s ostracized from and removed from her group. Both in the lab and also externally as well in the present day. Obviously, he doesn’t know that, but I think that’s part of her character and that’s part of his character too. He sees her potential. He sees that she is as strong as he is and that she does have that capability. She’s nicer than all the others.”

"I remember walking around set when we were doing those scenes or in that universe, and I was just full of hatred and fury toward all the others. By her age, there was just something special and unique about her and when he says to her in [Episode] 7, “Because I believe in you,” he genuinely does believe in her ability. He does believe in who she is because she’s a reflection of him, also. Not wholly, because she potentially has a stronger moral compass or a strong sense of identity to not be manipulated by him, but certainly 80 percent of her is him."

Of course, his feelings about Eleven change a bit after he murders pretty much everyone in the lab and Eleven blasts him into the Upside Down. She doesn’t go for his “join me and together we can rule the galaxy” thing. But who’s to say he couldn’t try again? “[H]e still has sympathy for her,” Bower said. “It’s two-handed. There’s sympathy and then there’s also just deep, deep, rage. He definitely sees her for who she his, but he also has some designs and his own goals.”

What Vecna wants

If Eleven had said yes to One’s offer to join forces, what would they have done together? Campbell Bower has a pretty good idea. “I think ultimately, even if he were to do that with her, even if he were to kind of remove themselves completely from society and live on their own like the X-Men facility, he would ultimately still be fueled by this vengeance and by the idea that the world is a lie to him,” he said. “People are putting on a front and that it is his job to show everyone that it’s all bollocks, and that we need to be honest with who we truly are. Even if they were for a brief period of time to exist in some sort of utopia, I think ultimately that would always be there to drive the want to kill, to recreate a world where they live in a reality more so than he perhaps considers the world to [on its own].”

So yeah, Vecna’s rage and hatred aren’t going away anytime soon, which is bad news for our heroes. That obsession with exposing hypocrites also accounts for why he chooses the victims he does. “Yeah, guilt and shame, 100 percent. For him, his upbringing with his father and having his father predominantly having done what he’s done in regards to his war efforts, I think that yes, anyone who has a secret that they are guilty or shameful about is what he’s trying to change. That’s his ultimate goal.”

"Ultimately, his main goal is still to bring righteous justice to the world, at least his version of righteous justice."

I’m sure that’ll work out fine.

The first seven episodes of Stranger Things season 4 are available to watch now on Netflix! The final two will drop on July 2.

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