CHARACTER BUILDING

From Twilight to Stranger Things' big bad Vecna, via Harry Potter and soon Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Jamie Campbell Bower's Television Award at the Rolling Stone UK Awards has been earned many times over

- By NICK LEVINE

After 18 years in the storytelling business, with three massive franchises under his belt and a fourth to come, Jamie Campbell Bower knows how he wants to present himself. He’s just spent a Sunday afternoon posing for his Rolling Stone UK cover story, but he’s still fresh and brimming with enthusiasm for the “beautiful, freeing experience” of making photos with a styling team he feels comfortable with. “I wouldn’t consider myself your typical suit-wearing man – it’s not what I like,” says the actor, musician and occasional model.

“I like things that are effeminate and flowing and sort of blending worlds.” A day before this shoot, Bower walked the runway at Paris Fashion Week for elegantly gothic label Ann Demeulemeester, which he calls an “amazing” but “fucking terrifying” experience. “I was like, ‘What am I doing here? I’m an actor!’” he says. “But I love what they’re about [as a brand] and feel so creatively inspired by them. They’re very music-oriented and very art-focused.”

Bower, 36, who recently moved back to the UK after several years living and working in Los Angeles, can trace his own slightly androgynous style to teenage adventures during “the heyday of the London indie music scene”. Before he was Dumbledore’s lover Gellert Grindelwald in the Harry Potter franchise, or the ancient vampire Caius in three Twilight movies, or the villainous Vecna in Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things, Bower played drums in a short-lived indie band called William K. “We’d all borrow our girlfriends’ jeans – girlfriends from school. Like, ‘How tight are your drainpipes?’” he recalls. “And we’d always wear a lot of eyeliner and stuff like that.”

Bower looks back at this period fondly as a “real community thing” where “you’d go to your local venue to see bands you’d like and express yourself in something like nu-rave.”