Sadie Sink was rolling on the floor rather than running up that hill.
Caution: Spoilers ahead.
The “Stranger Things” star revealed to Vulture in an interview published Monday that she had a very visceral response to seeing her Season 4 co-star Jamie Campbell Bower in his full Vecna costume for the first time.
“When I first saw him, I started laughing uncontrollably,” Sink told the entertainment site. “Just total laughter. I didn’t know what I was looking at, you know? I was scared, but fascinated, and feeling such a weird array of emotions that it just came out as laughter. But once we started filming, I wasn’t laughing anymore, that’s for sure.”
Vecna, Season 4’s big bad, was once a totally normal (but murder-happy) human named Henry Creel, who looked like this:
But once he goes on a killing rampage in Hawkins National Laboratory, he’s sent to the Upside Down, where he transforms into an eye-sucking and limb-twisting monster that looks a bit like this:
Sink explained to Vulture that she had met Campbell Bower briefly at a table read before the COVID-19 pandemic. But because so much time had lapsed between the reading and actual filming, seeing him for the first time in his full Vecna get-up was pretty surreal. Sink noted she didn’t know what Vecna “was supposed to look like or who he was until we started filming together.”
“There was no rehearsal or prep between the two of us — we just showed up on the day,” Sink said. “I had no idea what Vecna was going to look like until I saw him for the first time. Jamie was so convincing and believable that I forgot there was a human in there. I was looking at Vecna and I remember meeting Jamie in person, out of his Vecna costume. I heard his voice before I saw his face. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, is that Jamie? Is this a sick joke?’ Then I realized that’s what he looked like underneath all of that. It’s crazy. There’s an actual human person underneath.”
And in case you need more proof that there was an actual human underneath all that monster garb, the official “Stranger Things” Twitter account posted a video showing Campbell Bower getting into costume, a process that the actor told The Hollywood Reporter took more than seven hours, which apparently gave Campbell Bower plenty of time to sip coffee and make a few phone calls: