Jamie Campbell Bower Says Stranger Things: The First Shadow Rewired His Vecna for Season 5 — A Villain Fueled by a Child’s Cry for Love
Two words hurled in a school hallway—poor boy—sparked outrage, a disciplinary probe, and a raw debate over class and bullying.
Stranger Things season 5 has been quietly threading in ideas from the stage prequel Stranger Things: The First Shadow, and now Jamie Campbell Bower is basically saying the quiet part out loud: the play fed directly into how he plays Henry Creel/Vecna. The overlap is real, but he also wants you to know he did his homework long before he sat down at London’s Phoenix Theatre.
How the play shaped Bower’s Vecna (without replacing his own backstory work)
In the new issue of SFX magazine, Bower says the Henry-centric prequel informed his season 4 performance and what he’s doing in the final chapter. But this wasn’t a last-minute patch. Thanks to the COVID lockdown, he had six months before season 4 to stew on Henry’s childhood: parents, primary caregivers, the whole messy family dynamic.
Seeing The First Shadow on stage ended up syncing with the backstory he’d already built. There’s a moment in the play where Henry’s mother, Virginia, hits him, and his father’s alcoholism keeps him at a remove. For Bower, that clicked: a kid desperate for warmth, not getting it, and becoming something monstrous out of that void. When he later met the actors playing his parents, the first thing out of his mouth was, well...
"I hate you."
He says the play essentially validated the work he’d already done internally. It didn’t overwrite his process; it confirmed it.
Season 5’s story beats that line up with The First Shadow
Episode 4, 'Sorcerer', spells out how deep this goes. Max is still stuck in Henry/Vecna’s mindscape and tells young Holly Wheeler that she’s spent months being marched through Henry’s life on repeat. The tour always boomerangs back to the Hawkins Lab massacre, but we also get a tease of 1959 Henry: the version who went to school with Joyce and Hopper and was about to put on Hammerstein’s 'Oklahoma!'. That is exactly the era The First Shadow lives in.
- In the play, Henry has just moved to Hawkins from Nevada and signs up for the school musical.
- He’s already wrestling with psychokinetic powers, which started after a run-in with a shadowy entity before he ever got to Hawkins.
- Season 5 nods to this with Max hiding out in caves on the edge of Henry’s constructed world, while he keeps an airbrushed version of the Creel House at the center.
- The mindscape keeps funneling back to the Hawkins Lab massacre, reinforcing how that day is ground zero for everything he becomes.
- The 1959 school setting (with Joyce, Hopper, and the rest) and the 'Oklahoma!' production are the bridge between the play and the show.
Why Henry rebuilt the Creel House in his head
Bower points out a smart character tell: if Henry can make anything in his not-real mind world, why rebuild his family home? His read is that Henry’s trying to reclaim and rewrite the place that never felt like his, to force it into something that finally does. That tracks with the way he plays Vecna’s endgame: the bitterness and score-settling energy of someone who believes the world took everything from him, so he’ll take everything back. It’s cruel, it’s warped, and it still lands with a sad little thud of, yeah, poor kid.
Stranger Things season 5 Vol. 1 is streaming now. Vol. 2 drops December 25.