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If you thought Vecna — played by Jamie Campbell Bower — looked a little bit different in season 5 of Stranger Things, you’re not alone. Even Jimmy Fallon and Millie Bobby Brown (who plays Eleven in the show) commented on the character’s appearance in a recent episode of The Tonight Show.
“I saw that a lot of fans noticed that Vecna looks slimmer this season, and they’re saying that he’s on Ozempic,” Fallon said in his monologue.
“It’s funny that people are commenting on Vecna’s body. I mean, God help him if he gets a little lip filler,” Brown jokingly added.
Vecna’s changed appearance comes down to a few things this season — both as part of the story and how Bower gets into his character’s prosthetics. First, you have to consider where Vecna’s storyline ended in season 4, and that’s with a lot of damage to his body. It would stand to reason that maybe Vecna is smaller this season after sustaining that.
However, Barrie Gower, makeup effects department head, tells PEOPLE that they wanted Vecna to be “larger than life” this season — but the application of the prosthetics that turn Bower into Vecna were completely different.
For season 4, Gower and his team spent an average of seven hours per day applying prosthetic pieces to Bower’s entire body. The team relied on physical effects rather than digital effects for the character, save for CGI that made the vines on Vecna’s body move.
For season 5, they relied more heavily on CGI, only applying prosthetics to Bower’s head and one arm. In this season, Vecna’s body is all done digitally, which is why the character looks different. Bower only had to sit in makeup to get the prosthetics applied for around three hours per day, this time around.
Get more behind-the-scenes details on how Vecna comes to life — straight from Gower — ahead.
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In Season 4, It Took 7 Hours Per Day to Get Bower into Makeup
“It was a four-man team of prosthetic artists. When we first did our makeup test, we spent about nine hours gluing it on him. It was a very intense day. We got it down to our personal record — something like six hours, 21 minutes. But it averaged about seven hours each day. It was this kind of carefully choreographed dance that the four of us would do around Jamie. He’d be sitting down, we’d do this, we’d stand him up, we’d do something else. We’d lie him on a massage table, glue his back on. Flip him over, glue his chest on. It’s a long process. But he was the fifth spoke in the wheel, really, with our team, Jamie.
“There’s not an inch on show of Jamie, really. And then the final product, really, in season four was pretty much our makeup, full on. And they had digitally used software to make his vines move and augment on his body, which would have been impossible to do practically.”
Bower Wore a New Set of Prosthetics Every Day He Filmed
“Every single day we do on set with Jamie, he has a brand new set of appliances every day, because everything gets destroyed at the end of the day. We remove everything. It’s all glued on with a really hardcore medical adhesive, and we have to remove it with mineral oils at the end of the day. By using these oils, it destroys the fine-blended edges. So every day we have a duplicate set of pieces painted meticulously to match continuity.”
Vecna Does Have a New Look for Season 5
“Matt and Ross [Duffer] were very keen to have this character heavily driven by Jamie’s performance rather than going down a completely CGI or digital route. But the actual scale of the character now was going to be larger than life.
“Also, he’d evolved to the point where his body was just made up of these mutated vines and things, rather than being 100% human form. He wanted the ability to be able to see through his body as well, through these cavernous masses and holes in his body, in his arms and what have you, which, again, would be impossible to achieve practically.
“Looking at the build and the expense and the time, it seemed like a more straightforward approach to, from the shoulders down, digitally recreate Jamie’s performance and the body, and we still had a practical head. We had a practical right arm as well, and it would 100% still be Jamie in that makeup.
“We made a spandex, Lycra suit for him, which was made with digitally printed fabric. It had the textures of Vecna’s vines all over it. We still kept hold of this a glove he wears on his left hand with mechanical finger extensions, because they wanted him to still have the ability of knowing that spatial awareness of how long his hand was.
“One thing we noticed [during the first makeup test] was that we would walk Jamie backwards and forwards and speak with the digital effects team, is that because of how he would need to hold himself and move with the new dimensions that are going to be done digitally, we couldn’t afford for Jamie to have his arms down by his side to relax for anything. So we built these pockets and had these little pads that sat in there that pushed his arms down and also pushed his shoulders out. It was almost like a football helmet and shoulders, which would, again, remind him of his gait and spatial awareness.
“We started using 3D printing technology to get the vines to curl within each other.”
Makeup Only Took 3 Hours Per Day for Season 5
“The way we actually manufactured the makeup was quite different to what we did on season 4. We had different materials and different mold-making procedures. We’d spend about three hours with him [in the chair], max.
It was a lot easier for him to go to the bathroom this season as well.
To get it off, there would be three of us taking the makeup off at the end of the day. We’d probably be looking at about 45 minutes to an hour, maybe, to get it off, de-rigged, clean, cleaned up, get some hot towels on him, all clean, send him on his way. On season 4, we were probably looking at the best part of about an hour and a half to two hours to get him out of his makeup at the end of the day.
Bower Would Work for Nearly 24 Hours at a Time to Get in and Out of Makeup on Shoot Days for Season 4
“We could be starting at 1 a.m., 2 a.m. to get him ready for 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. We would have a whole shooting day of, maybe a 10 to 12 hours. Then we would be de-rigging him two hours in the evening.
By the time they got to the fourth season, the production team was so experienced and so on it. Tudor Jones — who’s one of the producers on season 5, but he was the first assistant director on season 4 — he scheduled the shoots so cleverly and considerably that we would never shoot Jamie two days on a row.
We’d have a super long day. We’d be exhausted, which might be on a Monday, but then we might not film again until Wednesday or Thursday. So there would be a full path of recovery,
It was similar on season 5, but, because our days were not so intense in the makeup chair, we were able to do a few more days back to back.
It Took Approximately 2 Weeks to Create a Full Set of Prosthetics Pieces
“We separate it all up and we make molds. So when we have these molds, that’s what we just generate these duplicate pieces from. We generate a whole set of appliances. His makeup was made up of about 26 pieces, I think, on season 4, which all overlap like a jigsaw puzzle.
And they would come upstairs to our art finishing, painting departments, and then our various artists would paint everything. To [make] a complete set, you’re probably looking at about two weeks of labor.
We would split our team accordingly. We’d have somebody painting the headpiece. Somebody painting the necks. There was somebody with a whole row of chins and faces. And then we’d have somebody with four chests on the go. Over that time, we’d be doing duplicates as a production line.
Even though we didn’t have full-body coverage on season 5, it wasn’t too dissimilar because the detail in the head this time and the interlocking vines. His hand as well. It still took the best part of maybe a week and a half to generate the pieces and art-finish them all.
Vecna’s Prosthetics in Season 5 Weigh Over 30 Lbs.
“His head and shoulders are about six kilos [13 lbs.], Then his chest would be the best part of about 3 to 4 kilos [7 to 9 lbs]. Same with his back. His right arm would be heavy. We made his left arm, his glove, and his legs out of a foam latex, which is a very lightweight material.
Bower Would Get into Character During the Prosthetics Process
As we were gluing things on, we start off with Jamie, and it’s Jamie’s voice. The more and more [covered with prosthetics and makeup] he got, the more Jamie started to shift, and his voice and accent shifted from this lovely, polite British accent into Vecna’s voice.
So by the point we got the final touches, and we were airbrushing and painting, he was talking to us as Vecna. But he was still a very polite Vecna. He was still Jamie.
In the process of doing makeup, we would start off with some quite gentle music. And maybe you’d have a YouTube video on or a little podcast, or we’d start off with something a little bit uptempo. As the process went on, the music got heavier and heavier, to the point it was pretty much death or thrash metal by the end of it.B
By the end of the process, it would calm down a little bit, and we’d end with a bit of Marilyn Manson or something like that. So it was just this really interesting journey throughout the seven-hour makeup process every day.
