Victor Creel pays for his mistakes in a number of very big ways in Stranger Things 4.
As a young man (Kevin L. Johnson), Victor serves in World War 2 and makes a horrible mistake. He orders the shelling of a location that doesn’t house German soldiers, but rather innocent civilians including a baby. About 14 years later, Victor moves into a beautiful new home in Hawkins with his wife and two children. While it may seem as though they’ve got a bright future ahead of them, evil is brewing in Victor’s son, Henry (Raphael Luce), and that evil winds up taking the lives of his wife and daughter.
Devastated by their loss and blamed for the crime, an incarcerated Victor tries to “join them” by stabbing himself in the eyes with a razor blade.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Robert Englund who plays the older version of Victor Creel and during the end of our conversation, we put the focus on what’s next for Victor — if anything. Yes, he had made some awful mistakes, but he’s essentially imprisoned for a crime he didn’t directly commit. Does that leave any hope for Victor whatsoever? If he learned the full truth of what Henry’s become, could he ever forgive himself? Englund offered his take and began:
“Victor’s guilt is certainly about the fact that he wasn’t able to save his family. Could be that he was in denial about Henry. It could be that he was, and this is the metaphor that I use, blind to what was going on and that’s why he blinded himself. Oedipus slept with his mother and blinded himself. Victor didn’t see the evil in his son and it cost him his family and he blinded himself. That’s an academic essay that you could turn in in film school about Stranger Things and Victor Creel. And I use a little bit of that. I use a little bit of Ben Gunn for some reason came into my head, from Treasure Island, the old blind man that tells Jim Hawkins, the boy, the backstory on Long John Silver. But I don’t know whether it’s appropriate for Victor to be redeemed. He made the terrible mistake in World War II, the baby died, a family died. He called in a shelling of an innocent farmhouse. And whether or not he sensed anything wrong with his son that he could have acted upon as a strong father and stopped and prevented with the dead animals or anything else, so it could have been some of that.”
Englund also pinpointed a key line of dialogue from Stranger Things 4, Episode 7 that could possibly tease what’s to come for Victor. Here’s how he put it:
“But the other thing is that I believe Vecna has a line, I don’t know [if it’s] Nancy walking in the sort of Salvador Dalí underworld Upside Down and you hear Vecna talking. I think it’s to Nancy, and he talks about me. He says, you know, ‘Oh, Victor. Old grumpy Victor. Never got back to him. Maybe I should. I’ve been so, so busy.’ So I don’t know what that means. Is he gonna kill me? Does he want to punish me more than I’ve already been punished? I don’t understand what that meant, or if they feel they need to pay that off. There’s so many loose ends that have to be resolved in Season 5.”
Want to hear even more from Englund about his experience playing Victor Creel in Stranger Things 4? You can find just that in our full video interview at the top of this article!