Stranger Things Broadway’s Louis McCartney on Leaving, Campbell Bower Cameo

Next month, Louis McCartney’s time in the Stranger Things universe is up — at least at the Marquis Theatre. Who knows what the future holds, but for now, it’s understandably a bittersweet goodbye.

The Irish-born actor originated the Stranger Things stage version of Henry Creel in the West End in late 2023. When Stranger Things: The First Shadow transferred to Broadway in 2025, he reprised the role, with previews beginning March 28 and opening night on April 22.

In that time, the show achieved both critical and commercial success, breaking box-office records. McCartney received a Tony nomination for best lead actor in a play, and the highly anticipated final season of Stranger Things was released on Netflix.

Written by Kate Trefry, with Stranger Things co-creators the Duffer Brothers on board as creative producers, The First Shadow is a prequel to the events of the horror series. It tells the story of how series villain Vecna came to be — and how he was once Henry. In the show, Jamie Campbell Bower plays Henry/Vecna and, for one night only, the series actor appeared in The First Shadow’s final scene as Henry, making his Broadway debut. “To welcome him into my world, to see his reaction and emotions and to watch him let them flow through was such a beautiful experience,” McCartney says.

Below, the 22-year-old actor tells THR how Campbell’s cameo transpired — and what happened behind the scenes — along with his thoughts on Vecna’s fate in the series finale, the show’s most challenging moments, how he’s evolved and what he’s looking to do next after his final performance on March 29. Following his exit, Victor de Paula Rocha will take over for the role of Henry.

***

You’ve been playing Henry Creel on Broadway for almost a year after previously starring in the West End production, after spending so much time with this character, how has your relationship to him evolved?

That’s a great question. One of the things that I’ve been realizing more is when you’re acting, people say to you, “You can always go deeper.” And part of you wants to say, “No, that’s not true. You can’t go deeper because I want to find a happy medium where I can go to work and I can be happy with what I do.” But then you work with people — basically everybody in this Broadway company who has this animal kind of instinct inside of them and everybody’s just pushing, pushing, pushing. Coming into Broadway having already done it for a year, thinking I understand the character, and being pleasantly, bloody humbled by everybody else showing this creative athleticism and just pushing me to understand him more. Unlike on a brass tacks level, I’ve been able to add stuff every day. I’ve been able to really look inside Henry’s mind, understand every scene and it’s just been a great exercise at keeping stuff fun while also keeping it hard work. But at the end of the day, it’s your job and you want to show up and have a good time. So mainly, I rely on a lot of people to keep the good vibes going and to push me to work harder, and I push them to work harder — that’s just been a great experience working with Henry all these years.

The show is genuinely scary, and a lot of that comes from the incredible special effects. What’s it like feeling that reaction from the audience while you’re on stage?

It’s a great, great reaction, because it’s nothing that has been done in theater before. People are not used to this. They’re not used to this level. They’re not used to this even being a possibility. Stephen Daldry, Justin Martin, everybody on the special effects team, set designer Sonia Friedman, there’s a real, strong powerhouse of British talent, and they’re all striving to create something that is going to break your mind. And we do that successfully, somehow. Also, what I love talking about is the challenge of acting with it, because it’s like A to B, it’s always going to happen. Stranger Things is designed by beat, and there are sound effects, and there’s cues and there are places you have to go for safety reasons. We have a huge Mind Flayer, which comes out in the show, and we have tons of different things going on with that. It’s not just that. There’s tons of cues, that there’s a line you have to say, there’s a whole body movement, and making sure the effect makes sense is a beautiful challenge, because you know it’s going to be there for you, and you know where the audience’s attention is going to go, and letting that go, and letting that happen, and letting this thing take the space it kind of gives back to you, this inanimate object you’re working with. It’s quite a fun experience, because it needs to make sense. It can’t just be a gimmick. You can’t just have a Demogorgon on stage that goes, “Rah!” and they go, “Oh my God, I’m so surprised! Now back to the acting.” It’s got to be working with you. It’s got to be working with you. It’s got to meld with your style and the story.

Is there a specific moment that you say was the hardest to pull off?

One of the hardest things, I think, that people will not overlook but not think about is the liquor store. It’s one of our scenes where we employ the double for the first time. So we have someone on stage doing my movements. I’m doing their movements. We’re the same person. It’s two Henrys on stage. And we go from a video screen projection to a blackout to the real person. So you don’t know where the real person comes in and where the projection ends, which is part of the magic. And it was all about creating a story in the play of how Henry discovered the static? How does he discover the black? But he can see him in this and again, that was all about making it make sense. It couldn’t just be like he’s super smart and figures it out in two seconds. Problem solved. We needed something that felt grounded and real.

When you’re working with such a magical theme, it’s really hard, and that’s where Stephen [Daldry] really came in. I mean, we spent hours on blocking and timing that whole sequence before Victor comes in, which is timed to the clock beats. So you’ll hear the grandfather clock in the background of the Creel house, and your brain, your subconscious, you won’t pick up on it. But for me, that is a 1-2-3-4, and I’ll follow that every night to make myself match up with what I recorded almost a year and a half ago now, which is funny, because when you’re doing it, you’re like, don’t mess it up, because it’s what you’re going to be doing on stage forever, and you got to follow it. But just that whole thing. There were so many different little bits. It wasn’t just like, hey, we need this illusion to work so that you can do this bit so that we can move on. It was like, great. Got that bit done. Wait, now, this doesn’t make sense, and we kept going back and kept trying to make it perfect, because it’s one of the very first scenes where things slow down, and it’s where it feels very Stranger Things. It’s very mystical, and there are powers and there’s confusion. There’s Henry, his own moral compass of what he can do when he’s in this space, changes. You see a character change; there’s lots of stuff that we were dealing with and making that work. It took forever, but I’m so glad that we spent the time that we did.

What are some other career goals and dreams of yours you want to pursue after this?

I’m trained in film and TV. I studied it in Dublin for nine months. I had no idea what theater was. I had no hopes of becoming a theater actor. I had no idea what it could give me. And then this thing comes along in London, and I’m thrown right into it, learning on the fly. I have the best time of my life, and I get this beautiful opportunity to do it again on Broadway and to experience all this, to really feel theater, what it can do for somebody, and the differences in your acting style, and building chemistry, building a night, making it work. When people mess up, you mess up. If an illusion fails, what do you do when a show stops? All this stuff that’s really great to know on a grand scale, I would love just to take it back to the screen with a film or TV show, Every actor wants something that’s a challenge, and I guess that’s what I’ll be seeking.

I don’t know if anything will ever top this athletic scale that I’ve had to poke and prod and make into this polished ball that works every night. I would love to do a nice, quirky little film; the film I did, Silent Roar, was shot on film, and that gave it its own aesthetic and feel. And I just love to go back to the screen and see if I’m any good, see if I still got it, or if I can hit anything. I’m still down to go deeper, to really explore other areas of marketing, with a new headspace, because I think it’s been really good for me to grow up as well over these last couple of years.

Jamie Campbell Bower’s cameo performance made headlines and just went absolutely viral. How did that come about?

I’ve only actually met Jamie three or four times. And the reason he looks like such a lovely person is because he is. He is always, arms outstretched, ready for a hug. He remembers stuff I said to him, remembers stuff I said about me and asks how I’m doing. He is the nicest person that I’ve ever, ever met. It was such an honor to be able to work with him, almost, in some sort of weird way. There’s no doubt about it that he fuels almost every single thing that I do on stage. He is the crux. He was, like I said, the dynamite of the First Shadow. To welcome him into my world, to see his reaction and emotions and to watch him let them flow through was such a beautiful experience. And to publicly share how much he means to me, how much he helped me, how much he drives what I do every day, and to share that moment with him was so special. I was so lucky because he’s freaking Jamie Campbell Bower, man! He’s busy, and for him to take the time to come down and spend the night with us, and do his Broadway debut with Stranger Things, it was so special. Honestly, it’s something that I will always keep.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Broadway theater so excited before.

(Laughs.) Yeah, when he turned around, that’s what we were all thinking. We were like, “Are they gonna notice the back of his head?” And they didn’t, because people are used to seeing me in the wig, or they just watched a play with this guy called Henry. They’re like, “Oh, why would anything else be different?” Then, when he turned around, it shook the theater. I was recording on my phone backstage as well. It was a good few minutes of applause and cheers and whoops, and then he said his first line, and then it all went again. Everybody was so excited to see him do it, reprising the original role on stage. I wish I were in that audience for God’s sake.

That’s funny to hear you were recording too. You’re just like us!

(Laughs.) Oh, yeah!

He did get emotional when you congratulated him on his Broadway debut, and you guys walked off stage together. What did he share with you about what that moment meant to him?

What I can say is that I was talking to him before season five was released, and he was talking about the cave scene, and the relation to the cave, to the play, and how freeing that was for him. A lot of the stuff we talked about is where it’s rooted in fear. Fear of not fitting, fear of doing the right thing. It’s like the First Shadow. We’re taking a very psychological, human look at how someone becomes Vecna. A lot of this stuff we talk about isn’t the superficial acting of it all, like, “Yeah, we both play Henry. We’re both good at being scary, right?” We love to talk about the human side of Henry, which I love about Jamie, because he’s so real and so ready to feel deeply. When you’re talking to him, you feel better afterwards. A lot of the stuff we talk about is simple and not simple. It’s nice when you talk to the main guy, and he agrees with what you’re saying because it’s like, “Thank God!”

I hope everybody gets a chance to talk to him, because he will give you the time and the space to talk about your life and how you’re feeling. It’s one of the key things I look up to him for. And he got emotional when I was talking to him and gave me a big hug. That means the world to me. He was openly showing me how much it also meant to him. He was not cagey. He wasn’t anxious. He wasn’t scared. He was just letting the moment fill his mind.

We’re now a couple of months post-finale. With some time to sit with it, what was your reaction to how the story ended? And were you satisfied with how Vecna’s arc ultimately wrapped up?

Yeah, I absolutely loved it. I was so excited because Alex Breaux is in season five. He plays Dr. Brenner in our show, and I get to talk to him afterwards about everything and his whole experience on the season. As a Stranger Things super fan myself, my whole family and my girlfriend’s family were all super excited. We all sat in a dark room with red lights and popcorn, watching the finale. Vecna being decapitated was so cool. I think The Duffers did everything right. It’s also extremely hard with a series finale such as this, one of the most anticipated series finales that has come out in the last few years; it’s really hard to hit something like that in the head. Nobody will ever be truly happy. There’s someone out there who thinks I suck, you know? It’s just the way that it works. But for me, I was extremely happy with it. I was proud of the show. I’m proud to be a part of it. I’m really excited to see where the Stranger Things universe goes from here.

You previously told us at the opening night of The First Shadow that you knew what was going to happen to Vecna going into season five. How far in advance did you know the ending?

So Kate [Trefry] showed me the whole bit with Max (Sadie Sink), Holly (Nell Fisher) and Vecna going down into the caves, and young Henry and his Captain Midnight costume, getting the suspicious materials and getting them at hand and seeing the mind flayer. Then, the mind flayer, I read a really good chunk of [the script], maybe 20 minutes of coming up to the final battle, and then it started to get really confusing, because I had no idea what any of it actually meant. I read past the cave instance and went, “Whoa, a pain tree, what’s this?” Like a mind flayer tree? She was like, “You want to keep reading?” And I was like, “Nah, I’m gonna wait until season five. Thanks, though.” So I could actually not know the full ending, but just have enough to talk about it a little and say, “It’s crazy what happened.” Also, it was really handy to know exactly what happened with the cave, because it was always shrouded in mystery, and it’s nice to be able to fully understand such a small moment in our play and to be able to encapsulate that in a true way.

You mentioned that you want to go back to the screen, and now that Jamie has made his Broadway debut. Has there been any talk of you making a cameo in a future Stranger Things project or spin-off?

Oh, wow, that would be so, so cool. I would love that. You know, there’s been no talk about it. But even if there was, I wouldn’t say. I wish there were. For it not end here, to continue, would be such an honor. And like anything, I hope they have me in mind, but at the end of the day, I’m happy with what I’ve done and what I’ve given. If I could change anything, I wouldn’t. But if I’m given the opportunity, I will most certainly grab it.

The First Shadow saw a boost in box office sales around the time of Jamie’s cameo. And then, alongside part three of the final season, what do you think it is about this story that continues to resonate so strongly with audiences, and what does the support from fans mean to you?

That’s an amazing question. What I love about Stranger Things is that you’re seeing all these people fighting for their lives and putting 100 percent into something, which, in its first form, is admirable. It’s what you want to do — it’s what I want to do. There is a melding of genres, of thriller, of coming of age, of horror, of action. Stranger Things has everything. It hits the nail on the head somewhere inside of your soul, you, no matter who you are. I think even if you don’t like Stranger Things, you will get something out of it, somewhere, somehow, because Kate Trefry, our writer, and a lot of the writing team and directors are so human. These people are like Gods of lust. Gods of power and Gods of connection. These demigods in the creative business who understand how a human might think and how Henry Creel might say, “I love you,” which seems impossible, but they know how to do it. That just connects with people, and especially with live theater, because that’s right in front of you. There’s nothing deniable that when you’re sitting in that seat and you’re watching live theater, it’s powerful to see another human being convincingly go through a completely fake art right in front of you, and for you to walk away just feeling like you’ve changed, like you’re emotionally exhausted, you’ve spent that journey with that character. And part of my job is to bring you along with me and help you understand the story.

Stranger Things is just the perfect kind of IP, whatever you want to call it, to do that — it’s much more than that. It is a human experience and it’s so deep and rooted and heartbreaking. Henry Creel is the perfect Crux for that: he is, as well as a dichotomy, a moral compass that sways left and right. You got the mind flayer on his left and humanity on his right side. There’s so much to consume in the First Shadow that I think that’s why people continue to like it, because there’s so much there. And what is there is truth, and it will always hit deep inside of your heart and for the audience’s response, it’s just been amazing, opening the show twice, and having people, with open arms, saying, I’m ready for you. What do you got? Hey, we love Stranger Things. We automatically love you. It took a lot of the pressure off with box office, critics and reviews. That stuff is going to happen no matter what; it’s the third party, which I can’t control — nobody can. You just got to let that stuff sit. Let people think what they think. But for the nerds, the fans of Stranger Things, for them to come along with us and be super excited for season five and super excited for Broadway, it meant the world. It was a huge challenge we were taking on, and there was pressure. I was really, really, really scared, but at the end of the day, we did it and everybody likes it. I’m very happy to be here and tell this story.

Are you ready to say goodbye to Henry, or do you feel like parts of this character will stay with you?

Truth of it, I don’t know. I’ve thought about this in many different ways. Depending on the day, I will either say, “This is way too hard.” Or, “Oh, my God, I love working with Alex, bro. How am I ever going to find anything like this ever again?” It sways, man. It’s indiscernible. I think it will happen on the day, and like Jamie, I’m gonna have to just feel it — there’s no other way around it. I’ve been so lucky with the people I’ve met. I met my partner on Stranger Things in London, in tech, and we’ve been together ever since. She makes me a better person. She has fueled me to do this, and she drives me to let that part of my life go and to open another chapter. It’s very exciting, very scary, but I’m very ready.