'Stranger Things' star Jamie Campbell Bower says he's 'still angry' about Vecna's backstory and thinks the villain has 'more humanity' than other characters

• Jamie Campbell Bower said his "Stranger Things" character, Vecna, had a lot of "humanity."
• He said he was "still angry" about the environment that his character was raised in.

Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays Vecna on "Stranger Things," said his character had "more humanity than perhaps any others" despite his murderous, dimension-ripping tendencies.

Bower, who joined the series in its fourth season to play the villain, told Variety he felt anger on behalf of his character. The villain, who operates from the Upside Down, was revealed to have started as a human with psychic powers. After murdering his family, he became the first child in Martin Brenner's Hawkins National Laboratory experiments — the ones that eventually led to Eleven honing her powers.

"He grew up in an environment where his father murdered a villain and a civilian family on the orders of people he never knew, who were presenting themselves as these upstanding citizens," Bower told Variety of the character. "In whose eyes are they upstanding? I'm still angry about it now!"

The big reveal about Vecna's past is in episode seven, which was released in the first part of season four on May 27. In it, a young Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) banishes Vecna to the Upside Down after he massacred all the other children in the laboratory. That banishment resulted in his monstrous physical appearance and serves as his motivation for menacing the town of Hawkins.

Bower said that while his character had "a lot of humanity," Eleven's banishment stripped him down to "rage and resentment."

"That is enraging," Bower said. "It's more than that — it's hate-fueling. It's irritating. It's actually really irritating."

Bower separately told People that to tap into Vecna's resentment, he printed photographs of each of his victims, crossing out their eyes, placing them on his wall, and staring at them.

"Resentment is a massive driving force for Vecna," Bower told People. "He already has this belief system that the world is a lie and that it's unjust. And so preparing was about bringing that up and digging that up more, [which meant] a lot of heavy, dark meditation, low-frequency sounds, a lot of saying the same kind of thing over and over again."