Part of Stranger Things featuring Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, and Gaten Matarazzo.
Rise to Fame
He spent a decade getting cast in franchise films nobody loved. Caius in Twilight, Jace in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, a young Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts. None of it stuck. The roles were fine; the franchises weren't. Then Stranger Things Season 4 cast him as Henry Creel, the boy who became Vecna, and everything shifted. He sat in prosthetic makeup for eight hours a day to play the season's villain. That commitment translated on screen. The internet went sideways for him in 2022 in a way it never had for Caius.
In the Spotlight
Stranger Things finished its run in 2025, and Bower's Vecna got the ending the character deserved. He didn't wait to see what Hollywood would offer next. In April 2024 he launched BloodMagic, a post-hardcore and black metal band with drummer Kyle Adams, debuting with "Death / Rebirth." He wiped his personal Instagram and launched a separate BloodMagic account to build the band's identity from scratch. That's either an artist taking his music seriously or a very committed rebrand. Probably both.
Side Notes
He trained on violin as a kid under the Suzuki method, which makes his pivot to fronting post-hardcore bands a peculiar but fitting arc. He got sober in March 2015 after addiction put him in hospital for mental health, and has talked publicly about suicide attempts and losing friends. He fronted Counterfeit, a punk rock band, from around 2015 until 2020. The darkness in BloodMagic's sound isn't a costume. It's the whole biography.