SPOILERS are ahead for Stranger Things Season 5, now streaming with a Netflix subscription. If you haven’t already – what are you waiting for? Go watch the end of the show.
I don’t care if it’s been two weeks since the Stranger Things finale, because I’m going to be insufferable talking about it for the foreseeable future! Along with debates still going on about what happened to Eleven, Netflix released a documentary about the making of the final season which offered audiences a better understanding of what it was like to film the huge fifth season from the cast and crew’s perspective. Now, we know that the Duffer Brothers didn’t have the script for the last episode “The Rightside Up” finalized until right before it was filmed. But Jamie Campbell Bower (a.k.a. Vecna) must have known some secrets ahead of time, right?
When CinemaBlend spoke to the actor behind the Stranger Things big bad, he answered this question. In his words:
For Season 4, I got to know so much, before anyone else did. But for this season, no. I knew just as much as everybody else did.
When you think about it, it’s kind of wild the actor didn’t have a leg up on his castmates when it comes to Vecna’s masterplan with the Upside Down. Bower, who kept one of Vecna’s hands after wrapping the show, said this regarding what happened when he did learn about what the Upside Down really is alongside the rest of the cast:
The description of what the Upside Down is and the physics-based world in which that can exist, sort of like quantum mechanics and things like that, is really fascinating to me and really interesting to me. It’s not something that I fully understand and not something that I'm not sure I will ever fully, completely be able to comprehend. But it did lead me down really interesting rabbit holes with regards to reading about it and references and books. Yeah, it was cool.
The Upside Down is of course science fiction, and you shouldn’t expect any Demogorgons knocking on your door (or coming out of your ceilings) anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some fun science behind the Upside Down. Jamie Campbell Bower told us he found himself going down some “interesting rabbit holes” regarding the science of the Stranger Things world, especially when it was finally explained by Dustin in Episode 7.
It goes to show that even though actors like Bower straight up have the Duffer Brothers' phone numbers and work directly with the creators on set, they had to experience the reveal much like the audience. In the new documentary, titled One Last Adventure, we even get to see the cast read the script for the finale together for the first time, and all the raw emotions that come out of the reactions to it.
There’s still more lingering questions regarding how Vecna opened the Upside Down, which the Duffer Brothers have said they will answer in the upcoming spinoff set to be a completely new story, with new characters and set in a new time period. While it’s pretty crazy that the Vecna actor didn’t know the secrets to the Upside Down before the finale, during our interview he did keep one detail about Mr. Whatsit close to the vest for fans to figure out.
