Stranger Things 4 Is Not Jamie Campbell Bower's First Time Playing A Creepy Savior
There is much to be excited about in Stranger Things’ fourth season. Netflix released the new episodes mere weeks ago, but fans have since been fascinated by the marvelously creepy performance of Jamie Campbell Bower as the season’s surprise villain, One. Yet some viewers will be unsurprised by Bower’s ability to balance the menacing with the enticing. For some viewers, his performance might even seem oddly familiar…because the actor embodied those same traits in a previous role. As Anthony Hope, the doe-eyed standard-bearer for dewy heroism in Tim Burton’s 2007 adaptation of Sweeney Todd, Jamie Campbell Bower not only toed the line of ghoulish virtue — his performance encapsulated the moral fallacies that the musical subverts to turn heroes into villains (and villains into meat pies).
Long-time fans of musical theater icon Stephen Sondheim tend to know what they should expect from his musicals. Sexual innuendo and social critique run fast and thick in Sondheim’s lyrics, from the outlandish gimmicks of Gypsy’s strippers to the uncomfortable double entendre of Into the Woods’ predatory wolf. Sweeney Todd is no different; the only male character who presents as wholly unproblematic is young Toby (whose emotionally-regressive adulthood is almost assured after what the story puts him through). This moral complexity made the project a perfect fit for Tim Burton, whose filmography is paved with ethically ambiguous characters in larger-than-life scenarios.
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“Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy sings a song and gets girl.” That is how Frank Sinatra, in documentary musical revue That’s Entertainment, summed up the plot of
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