How Jamie Campbell Bower Prepared for Stranger Things Role

Warning: Spoilers ahead! 

Jamie Campbell Bower is giving very “politician”-like answers after his debut in Stranger Things season four.

The actor made his first appearance in Volume I, in which he plays an orderly who befriends Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) while she’s in the Hawkins Laboratory. But in episode seven, it’s revealed that he’s actually Henry Creel, a.k.a. the mysterious One, whose powers inspired Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) to launch the program that created Eleven. 

What’s more, Creel became the terrifying monster Vecna when Eleven banished him. Since their fateful encounter, he’s been killing Hawkins’ teens and gaining strength in the Upside Down.

So yeah, the pressure was on as soon as Bower auditioned for the role.

He told Entertainment Weekly that he was so keen on getting the character down, he ended up creating a book about Henry’s origin story, which he later showed to creators Matt and Ross Duffer during the audition. “They were like, ‘Have you read the script? This is literally perfect,'” he remembered. “So they scuttled off into the backroom of the house that they write in and came back with all these amazing 3D renders and telling me more about the story of Vecna and of Henry and of One.”