Jamie Campbell Bower

The thing Jamie Campbell Bower does is stand still. As Vecna in Stranger Things (2022 and 2025) he is a long, slow shape under prosthetics that took up to eight hours to apply, and most of the menace comes from how little he does and how low he speaks. He has said of the voice that it "had to come from a place of real truth", and whatever that means in practice, it is pitched a long way below where you expect a thin young Englishman to find it. Fifteen years earlier, in Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), he was the opposite: Anthony Hope, the one sincere, unbloodied face in a film that otherwise runs red, with a voice that had come through the National Youth Music Theatre and sounded it.

He was cast in Sweeney Todd while still at school, after a friend recommended him to an agent, and did not go to drama school afterwards; he has said he feared losing momentum. What followed was a decade of franchise work in which the parts were smaller than the posters. Caius in the Twilight films (2009 to 2012) and the young Grindelwald in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010), reprised in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), were both widely felt to be underused, with supporting turns in Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla (2008) and Winter in Wartime (2008) in between. The one lead, Jace Wayland in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), landed in a film that was poorly received, and some found the performance flat. Television gave him more to carry, King Arthur in Camelot (2011) and Christopher Marlowe in Will (2017), but it was the Duffer brothers who worked out what he was for.

The pattern is plain enough. Asked to carry a film on charm, he goes blank; given a posture, a mask and a reason not to move, he becomes interesting. It helps that he is a musician as well, lead singer and guitarist of Counterfeit from 2015 to 2020, because what distinguishes Vecna is control of breath and pitch rather than the latex. Watching Sweeney Todd again, we found ourselves grateful for Anthony each time he turned up: a boy who means what he sings, in a film where almost nobody else does, and Bower plays the earnestness straight when a less confident actor would have winked.

The caveat is that the two roles that define him both put a good deal between him and the camera, a Sondheim score at one end and eight hours of makeup at the other. Whether there is a performance of the same weight in him without either is the open question, and The Mortal Instruments is not an encouraging answer. He has said he would like to work with Burton again. On the evidence he should, because Burton gives him something strange to stand still in front of.