Vecna's Secret Origins Revealed Ahead of Stranger Things' Final Season

With the final season of Stranger Things on the horizon, hints suggest that the stage production, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, will play a major role in the show's endgame. Fans have been buzzing about the connections between the two, and now, Vecna actor Jamie Campbell Bower is fanning the flames. He recently confirmed that the prequel play, which centers on a young Henry Creel, directly influenced his portrayal in season 4 and will continue to do so in the final installment. However, he also made it clear that he was already deeply exploring his character's troubled childhood long before he ever sat down in a seat at London’s Phoenix Theater.

An Actor's Insight

"It's difficult to say this without sounding like a prick, because I'd spent so much time thinking about his childhood during filming," the British actor shared with a laugh in a recent SFX magazine interview. "We were in lockdown before we started shooting season 4, so I had six months to stew on this. I would ask myself questions about the parental relationship, about this relationship with the primary caregivers..."

Bower explained that seeing the play brought his own interpretations to life. "When I went to the stage show, and I saw that moment where [his mother] Virginia hits Henry, I was like, 'Of _course_ that happens, and of course the father being an alcoholic creates a distance. This is a child screaming for love, just wanting to be loved, wanting to be nurtured. Unfortunately for the two actors who played my parents, the first and only thing I could say to them when I met them was, 'I hate you.' So it does inform those thoughts that I've been thinking, the work that I've been doing. To have that be qualified was good for me."

Connecting the Dots

In the fourth episode of season 4, titled 'Sorcerer', viewers got a glimpse into this connection. Max, trapped inside Henry/Vecna's mind, tells a young Holly Wheeler that she's been forced to relive key moments from Vecna's past. While these trips down memory lane usually ended at the Hawkins Lab massacre, a different flashback to 1959 was teased: a time when Henry was in school with Joyce, Hopper, and other familiar faces, preparing for a production of Hammerstein's Oklahoma!

This school play is the central focus of The First Shadow. The story follows a shy and troubled Henry who joins the production after his family moves to town from Nevada. The play also explores his struggle to control his emerging psychokinetic abilities, which he developed after an encounter with a mysterious shadowy entity before arriving in Hawkins.

Inside the Creel House

We've already seen hints of this backstory on screen, particularly with Max hiding in the caves on the edge of Henry's mindscape, where he resides in a seemingly perfect version of the Creel House. Bower found this choice fascinating. "I thought it was really interesting that in [season] five, of all the things he could have created – because this is not the real world – of all the choices he made, he decided he'd recreate his family home. Why? What needed to be healed within that space?"

He developed his own theory about the character's motivation. "I came to this idea that, 'This place never felt like mine, and now I can make it feel like mine, and I can make it feel like home again, if I choose to'. Those pervasive thoughts were always with me as I was carrying through on the journey, even with Vecna. When it comes down to it he has bitter, twisted resentment: 'You took everything from me, so I'm going to take everything from you.' It is monstrous at the end of the day, with Henry, but I mean, poor boy. Just, poor boy."