Vecna, played on the hit show by Jamie Campbell Bower, is part man, part monster, and part…barbecue chicken, extra-charred, the hit’s makeup and effects gurus tell Vanity Fair.
Barrie Gower, the makeup special effects department head for the show’s fourth and fifth seasons, was largely responsible for developing and executing Vecna’s look, both last season’s initial styling, which required Jamie Campbell Bower to don 25 overlapping pieces of full-body prosthetics in a seven-ish hour process, and what Gower and the team call “Vecna 2.
0,” the character’s decidedly crispier and less solid current form, having been set on fire and, oh, blasted out of our dimension in the season 4 finale. If Vecna’s tentacle-like vines, which occasionally spew viscous black goo in service of their master, aren’t enough to put you off your lunch, Gower’s comparisons just might. “Vecna’s color tone is made up of vegetable chips,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I can see, oh, there's parsnip, there's the beetroot, there's the so and so…we looked at so many beautiful, different things from the animal kingdom. We just reference real life.” That grounding in organic materials and the real world is especially helpful because Vecna, like many of the ghoulish characters and effects on the show, is a hybrid creation of Bower’s performance, practical costuming and prosthetics, and CGI. Gower’s team collaborated closely with the visual effects department, led by Betsy Paterson, to synthesize real and fantasy elements to create the horrific world of Stranger Things. “There's a lot of back and forth with Barrie,” Paterson says. “We send them concept art. He sends back sculpts, and it just goes back and forth, and we try to figure out the best way that he can build things that will allow Jamie's performance to come through, but also give us a really good base to add all the kind of moving detail on top of.” Paterson, who joined the show’s crew just this season, has ready answers for every one of my queries about the nightmare creatures plaguing Hawkins, Indiana and the Upside Down: whether Demogorgons have gender , if they’re smart , what Vecna’s vine-tacles would feel like , and more. She agrees that if chewed, Vecna’s remaining flesh would likely be tough and taste gamy. It’s her job to think her creations through, from the inside out: “We always do that with CG creatures,” she says. “We build them up from the skeleton that we put a muscle structure on them, and skin and fat and the whole everything, so that they move and feel like real, organic beings.” After all, you can’t know what it would look like for a Demogorgon’s limbs to twist and break, as they do in the final scenes of episode 4, without first having an intimate understanding of how those limbs fit together. Likewise, Paterson had to learn about Vecna in all of his forms: First as the human Henry Creel, later known as One, then as the sinewy humanoid Vecna, and further as what both Paterson and Gower refer to as Vecna 2.0, or “Vecna on steroids,” as Gower says, bigger, badder, and even more bent on revenge than before. Instead of season 4’s jigsaw puzzle of prosthetics, this season Bower was fitted with detailed physical apparatuses on his head, neck, shoulders, and hands, a process that took three artists about three-and-a-half hours each day he filmed as Vecna. Complete with dentures, this allowed Ross and Matt Duffer, the show’s creators, to capture Bower’s performance in close-ups with minimal post-production intervention. Because Vecna’s body this season is increasingly comprised of his writhing vine-tacles, “there’s an awful lot of movement in there, which we wouldn’t be able to recreate practically,” not to mention, Gower adds, that “there are a lot of cavities and negative space. You can actually see through Vecna in so many areas.” To avoid the distracting on-set silliness of a traditional bright green motion capture suit, Gower created a skin-tight catsuit for Bower in a print that Paterson fondly called “Vecna camo,” a blend of those veggie-chip purples and greens and yellows and reds that would both help his figure stay consistent for lighting and help Bower maintain his character’s menacing air. To help him achieve the long gait and broad-shouldered stance of Vecna 2.0,, padding was also added around Bower’s chest, forcing him to hold his arms slightly aloft to make room for those CG vines and their hell goo. And that’s where Paterson’s digital contribution to the Vecna potluck comes in. “Well, for Vecna, we did quite a bit of research into barbecued meat,” she says. “Underneath it all he has bits of human left that were set on fire at the end of season four. So we thought, okay, that whatever little bits of skin and human flesh that are left will be barbecued.” Specifically, she looked the most at crispy chicken for inspiration. “Like a really heavily charred piece of barbecue chicken.” Order up. And then there was the lube, of which Gower says the team used “gallons,” buying up both K-Y Jelly and UltraWet in bulk to slather on Bower for Vecna’s signature sheen. For the final step of Bower’s makeup, “we get our rubber gloves on and we cover him in lube, all glossy and slimy.” “We would lube him up first thing in the morning,” he says, occasionally spritzing Bower with water or reapplying in spots as hot lights dried up the goo. “You have to be quite careful as well, because depending on the environment we're filming in, if you're in a quite a dusty environment, that kind of gravitates to the lube and sticks to it, or if Vecna has to roll or do something and he falls on the floor, it’s like a magnet to dirt and the environment around him.” Gower recalls fondly, “Sometimes we wouldn't necessarily lube him up quite as much, but he would tend to leave a little trail.” The makeup and effects teams worked together closely, also coordinating with stunts, lighting, set design, and more, to contribute to the final products, not just for Vecna, but for the Demogorgons, the living, oozing wall that some characters find themselves trapped behind in the Upside Down, brutal gore like the Wheeler family faces after a showdown, facial mapping for flashbacks to young Will , and the ideal trickle of blood seeping from his nose when he first manifests his own telekinetic powers. “It was trying to find the blend of what can be visual effects that aids them rather than inhibits them,” Gower says of the process, which for Schnapp, in the final scene of episode 4, included eerie white contact lenses with a small hole in them so he could see on set that were later digitally erased, and for Bower, that custom catsuit and other modifications. “It was just a joy. The perfect balance of practical and visual effects.”
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