Barrie Gower Opens Up on Crafting Some of TV’s Best Special Effects

Gower has worked on three of the of the most popular tv shows in the last decade, which are The Last of Us, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones.

Barrie Gower is a special effects artist whose career goes back several years. The creative director of BGFX alongside Sarah Gower, one of the more recent projects that Barrie Gower has worked on was bringing the Infected to life on HBO’s The Last of Us. For the Clickers, one of the more advanced stages of the infection, Gower told Entertainment Weekly that their appearance subtly changed depending on the environment.

“There was the benchmark — traditional orange and yellows and grays that we had in the game — but we were gonna be in lots of different environments during The Last of Us season 1. Maybe as the franchise progressed, we might find climate changes; locations are gonna change; and heat, whether you are in dry or moist environments. It could also be a seasonal change. So we just said, ‘Could all this have an impact on the color, the finish, and the texture of the Infected?'”

In the HBO tv series, the cordyceps infection utilizes a neural network of tendrils that keeps all the Infected connected. Another viney character that Gower worked on was Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) from Stranger Things. In fact, Gower was working on Stranger Things 4 when he started work on The Last of Us.

“The brief was: He’s from the Upside Down, there needs to be a relationship between him and this environment where he’s spent the last 10 years. But it’s funny how we had the same artists working on Vecna that also worked on The Last of Us. So there’s probably a lot of traits, shapes and forms that are quite similar.”

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Other Projects Bower Worked On

Another TV show that Gower came aboard for its fourth season was Game of Thrones. There, he designed the look for the Night King. Originally the leader of the White Walkers was played by Richard Brake but was later replaced by Vladimir Furdik when the role became more action-oriented. The Night King was also a character who didn’t exist in the books and was created for the show.

“We worked very closely with the showrunners [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] and we had a brief. We had texts from George R.R. Martin’s books as a description of how the Night King should look. We worked with [Swindell] on having this regal crown of icicles growing out of his head.”

Gower’s work hasn’t just been for the small screen, either. One of the films he’s worked on was The Green Knight, which starred Ralph Inenson as the title character. According to Gower, it was “a really extreme makeup process” that involved heavy makeup and armor. And that’s even with the thin silicone skin and a lightweight foam core to help with the weight.

“It was quite a process and an ordeal for [Inenson]. It’d be very interesting to get Ralph together with Jamie Campbell Bower so they could share their experiences in the prosthetics. Vecna was probably one of the most extreme makeup transformations we’ve done as a company, because he was in head-to-toe prosthetics.”

Vecna and the Infected are expected to return for both Stranger Things 5 and The Last of Us season 2. For the latter, fans of the game will probably be interested in seeing if and when the show gets around to adapting the Rat King from The Last of Us Part II. For those that haven’t played, let’s just say that it’ll be interesting to see how Gower and his team pull that off.