Actress Millie Bobby Brown burst into tears when she saw Jamie Campbell Bower's Vecna suited up on set - that's how disturbing his suit was.
In an interview with Variety, Bower said that Brown, who plays Eleven in the series, looked appalled by his look, as his character was created largely with the help of practical effects.
“They brought her up into a position where she’s bound. I walked up to her [as Vecna] and she burst into tears. She wouldn’t look at me and she was visibly just disgusted by the whole thing," he said. "After she cried and I made it obvious that she knew it was me, one of the things she said was that, ‘I knew it was you when I could smell cigarettes,’ because I’m a smoker."
In another interview with the outlet, Bower said that he would be "just fervently going through it and building it and it was a lot", with Brown telling him that he was "a freak".
“She was terrified, like, literally terrified, and when she saw Vecna, she burst into tears and she said, ‘That’s not my friend. I don’t know who this person is anymore. Where’s he gone?'” Bower recalled.
The actor portrays a horrifying creature birthed by the Upside Down - a sinister underworld in the fictional town of Hawkins. Vecna is a large zombie-like monster with vines sprouting from his spine and horrendous veins riddling through his disfigured body. Naturally, the actor's final look on set was more than unsettling, given that ‘Stranger Things’ directors the Duffer brothers decided that Vecna will be created with practical effects.
In order to make the villain look as real and scary as possible, Bower had to spend hours with make-up artists as they adjusted 25 pieces of latex and silicone rubber material to his body via a medical adhesive. The only thing in Vecna that was created with the help of CGI was the vine extensions coming out of his body.
In total, the actor's transformation took seven and a half hours, plus 10-12 hours of filming a day.
'Stranger Things' has become a cult phenomenon, with season four wrapping up on 1 July after already breaking the Nielsen streaming record to score 7.2 billion minutes watched in one week.