Jamie Campbell Bower has had a robust career for a while, but he really broke out playing the villain Vecna on the most recent season of Stranger Things. Everyone’s looking forward to seeing what fresh hell he unleashes upon Hawkins, Indiana when the Netflix show returns for a fifth and final season.
But Campbell could have broken big much earlier. The actor recently appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and revealed that he in contention for the role of none other than Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. “They came to my school to look for potential Potters or potential cast members and pulled me out of a bunch of people,” Bower remembered.
Obviously, that role went to Daniel Radcliffe. Bower puts his failure to snag that role down to his choice of material. “I went to go meet Chris Columbus in London for the first Potter and they asked us to prepare a joke,” he remembered. “I had just heard this joke about the reason the fairy sits on top of the Christmas tree. It’s a really dirty joke because it’s about a Christmas tree being up someone’s bottom. And I told the joke in the audition. There was this air of silence after I said it. I said ‘Well, f**ked that up. Time to move on.'”
Audition for the hero and play the villain: The story of Jamie Campbell Bower’s career
Bower would eventually appear in the Harry Potter movies as young Grindelwald. And that wasn’t the first time he auditioned for the hero and ended up playing a villain. Later in his life, Bower was up for the role of moody-sparkly vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, a part that eventually went to Robert Pattinson.
“They were really interested in me reading for Edward,” Bower recalled. “They were like ‘the dedication Jamie brings to his roles, we would be interested in seeing him,’ and all of this and all of that. And it just didn’t work out at the time because it was around the same time I think was being released that they were interested in seeing me. I think life was just so crazy and hectic it was just one of those things that never came to fruition.”
But Bower did eventually make it into the Twilight franchise, playing the villain Caius. Now that he’s gotten famous for playing Vecna, I think he’s going to be offered villain roles until the day he dies.
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h/t CinemaBlend