STRANGER THINGS Actor Reveals Scrapped Final Line That Would Have Connected to the Stage Play
Stranger Things is over, and fans are pretty divided about the finale. Some felt the final showdown was too easy, some were happy that the series ended generally happily, and everyone has a different point of view on what happened to Eleven.
But what’s done is done, and we got through the story that the Duffer Brothers set out to tell. There are, of course, lots of fun behind the scenes stories that the cast and crew are finally getting to tell now that fans have seen it all, and actor Jamie Campbell Bower has his own final line reveal that he said ultimately just didn’t work.
Bower, who played Vecna/Henry Creel/One in the show, sat down on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon to talk about the final season, and around the 6 minute mark, the actor described what he tried to integrate into Vecna’s final moment. The villain’s final words would have been another key connection to the stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
“I wanted to try and convey the words ‘please don’t’. I don’t know if anybody here has seen The First Shadow, which is the play they’ve done of Stranger Things and the sort of Henry Creel backstory, and obviously Henry and Joyce, within that, have met each other.
“So when she kind of walks up to him, I felt like in that moment, that the humanity could come through a little bit more, and that we could just reintroduce that level of sort of potential maybe he could be saved at that point.”
He went on to reveal that he had been able to add a line in post after shooting season 4 of the show:
“And when we were doing season four, there’s a bit where Eleven turns Vecna around, it’s when we’re in the snowball, and she says ‘hi’, and just before that I sort of growl.
“And we were in ADR and I was like, ‘It looks like I’m saying the word you, can I add that in ADR, and they were like, ‘yeah, yeah sure, let’s try it.’ I don’t want to step on her line and make her line not cool, but let’s try it.
“So we tried it, and it worked, and it was great. Anyway, we get to ADR for season five. I’m like gurgling, and I’m like I remember all I wanted to say was ‘please don’t’, and we try it, and it just didn’t work. It didn’t land, but the emotion is there,” Bower said. “I tried it, yeah, it wasn’t good.”
You never know if an idea is going to work until you try it out. But I didn’t need to see a flash of humanity within Vecna before he died. We got to see more of his backstory this season, and it didn’t change who and what he was- a terrorizing force that had to be eliminated.
Joyce didn’t need to feel any ounce of guilt in her badass mom moment where she finally avenged her son and got to use her ax.
Stranger Things season 5 is now streaming on Netflix.