The fourth season of Stranger Things has come to an end, and it’s been as enormously successful as ever. It’s broken streaming records on Netflix, and its popularity even catapulted a nearly 30-year-old song back onto the charts.
This season has been just as scary—if not scarier—than its previous entries, and apparently the horror was just as real on set as it is on screen. In a recent interview with Variety, Stranger Things star Jamie Campbell Bower said that co-star Millie Bobby Brown “burst into tears” when she saw him as the villain Vecna.
Bower’s prosthetics were so realistic they rendered the actor unrecognizable to Brown. “They brought her up into a position where she’s bound,” recalled Bower. “I walked up to her and she burst into tears. She wouldn’t look at me and she was visibly just disgusted by the whole thing.” Bower’s role as Vecna required extensive makeup and prosthetic work to make him look like he had reptilian skin and tentacles coming out of his back.
The process was overseen by the prosthetics designer Barrie Gower, whose work has appeared in Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. It took almost eight hours to complete the design on Bower, and then he would have to film for ten to twelve hours. The exhausting process was topped off with an hour-long removal of the latex.
All the work paid off, however, as the only thing that reminded Brown that Bower was under all the makeup was his smell. Said Bower: “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.”
[via]