Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545191
32 • THE ARTISAN SUMMER 2026 Mike, you worked with Jamie Campbell Bower previously on Season 4, and you guys were all old buddies with Barrie and Duncan. Tell me about what it was like working with the team on Season 5. Mike: Starting Season 4, I showed up not knowing what I was being asked to do—it was a surprise, and I had no idea if it was to be part of the support team or a recurring character. Working with Jamie Campbell Bower on Season 4 is one of the best experiences of my career. He's kind, hilarious, and never in a bad mood, so that was definitely a contributing factor to going back for Season 5. Six and a half hours of make-up was scaled back to 3½ hours for our version of Vecna 2.0; his body was partially missing in areas, and that's just not something you can do with prosthetics. BGFX created an epic spandex suit for CGI replacement. Eryn: The final season took place over a six-day period. We had a month to prep, and then 12 months of shooting. One of our challenges was maintaining the continuity of the characters' injuries, which barely changed and had to be consistent throughout the entire year of filming. Mike: Finding a solution for making sure everything looked the same every day over that length of time was the challenge. I had one actor in particular where, no matter what I did, nothing would stay on; I was constantly doing a full retouch-up of the injuries. I decided that I would make a tattoo transfer of his wounds, making it much easier if I just had to wipe it off and then completely reapply a new one, and make small changes for those six days. It became much easier to do the first and second units and stunts. This technique became a through-line with many of the characters' injuries. I even used a 10% opacity template for blood continuity on one of Jamie's other incarnations, Henry. Eryn: I was a little worried about not free-handing the injuries, but Mike convinced me to go with tattoo transfers. Of course, we've been doing tattoo transfers for 25 years, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do them for continuity. I had all our artists establish the looks of the injuries on their actors. Mike took photos of everything, then created a transfer and printed them right in the trailer. We were doing that on the fly, establishing blood streaks, injuries, etc., which was a real benefit to all of us. This was the first year the Duffer Brothers had an on-set make-up designer, and Frank Darabont loved it, too. Mike: Going into production meetings, we had a little bit of leeway to come up with our own designs. I would design in Procreate, then show the Duffers or Frank, giving them three different versions going from less to more extreme; always pushing for as extreme as possible, because that's what we do! They were very open to that process, and I think they appreciated that we had already concepted the looks being discussed and trusted that we could deliver on what we had shown them. I would connect with Barrie, and we would design from a library of prosthetics. Mrs. Wheeler's Demogorgon injuries, for example. We could order specific skin tones in multiples, depending on how many shooting days they played, with a short turnaround time. Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson and Joe Keery as Steve Harrington