StrangerThings season 4's Vecna actor Jamie Campbell Bower reveals Millie Bobby Brown was terrified of him on set. '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.'
Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown was apparently terrified and visually disgusted by season 4 villain Vecna, according to her co-star. The hit science-fiction horror TV show first debuted on Netflix back in July 2016 to unanimous critical acclaim and has gone on to become Netflix's most-watched English series.
SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY Spanish-born British actress Brown stars as Eleven, a troubled girl with psychokinetic and telekinetic abilities, who must use them to protect her friends, and the town of Hawkins, from the imminent threats posed by a parallel universe known as the Upside Down. Over the course of the series, Eleven must learn to harness her increasing powers, while also struggling to integrate into normal life, having spent years as a test subject in a government laboratory.
“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. 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.”
Vecna is considered one of the scariest and most power villains in the show, and his appearance in the latest season, as well as his subsequent backstory, which linked heavily to earlier seasons, was praised by fans and critics alike. Influenced by classic 80s horror, visually, the villain is not dissimilar to A Nightmare On Elm Street dream demon Freddy Kruger. Kruger actor and horror icon Robert Englund has a cameo appearance in the season.
The terrifying nature of Vecna could well have been down to the fact that the character was described as being"90% practical" with the producers trying to move away from CGI as much as possible, so there is every chance Brown's reaction was genuine. It will certainly have made for a more realistic performance from the Enola Holmes star, as she engages the monster in a mind battle.