Louis McCartney Is Making Magic in Stranger Things: The First Shadow

Louis McCartney is showing off his magic. “I’ve been doing magic with my girlfriend,” he says, as he picks up a deck of cards. It’s 5 PM on a Thursday at Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway. The show begins in two hours. But backstage in his dressing room, lead actor McCartney is relaxed.

He asks me to pick a card from the deck. I do, memorizing it: four of spades. McCartney then shuffles the deck, assuring me with a smirk: “It’s, like, proper, so there’s no funny business here.” He then presents the deck again, asking me to “give it a magic tap.” I do, and then voila: All the cards have flipped themselves around except for the four of spades.

I exclaim in surprise, to which McCartney asks, eagerly: “Is it cool?” It really is. And it’s a reminder that despite McCartney leading a show on Broadway where he’s kind of evil, the Irish actor is quite young, and still bright-eyed. At the age of 21, McCartney has flown from his home in the U.K. to a brand-new city, to lead a Broadway show. It’s not just offstage. Stranger Things has McCartney doing magic on the stage: making others levitate, bringing down monsters from the sky, and also warping his voice and body in ways that make you wonder, “How is he doing that?!” The show’s special effects team won a Special Tony Award, and three other design awards, while McCartney himself is one of the youngest actors to ever be nominated for a Tony Award for Lead Actor in a Play.

Though the show is special-effects driven, it would all be mindless spectacle without a heart at the center of it, which is McCartney's performance. As Henry Creel, McCartney is the picture of frightening intensity on the stage. The show, currently playing to enraptured audiences at the Marquis Theatre, is a prequel to the Stranger Things television series on Netflix. Written by longtime Stranger Things writer Kate Trefry, it is the origin story of the series’ big bad, Vecna, and how he went from an awkward teenager to a supernatural being with catastrophic powers. McCartney has a tightrope he has to walk during the show: Create a character that the audience can care for, so that when he inevitably breaks bad, it feels that much more tragic.

“It’s not just Act One: normal kid, Act Two: psychopath,” says McCartney, whose normal voice is much lower than the higher-pitched American accent that he adopts for the show. “It’s merging those…it’s like shuffling a deck of cards.” It is that teetering between light and dark, and it all potentially falling apart at any moment, that makes McCartney’s performance so compelling. And it is a performance he’s continued to refine ever since he originated the role in the West End in 2023.

“There was a period in London, about six months in, I realized I was doing it wrong,” explains McCartney. “People were saying they were terrified of me...But what I want is for people to be heartbroken.” McCartney doesn’t want audiences to write Henry off from the beginning as irredeemable. Instead, he wants them to look at the influences around Henry—from his family, to his girlfriend Patty, to his foster dad (of sorts) Dr. Brenner, to “his own awkwardness and need to be wanted. And that is the catalyst behind why he likes the powers. It’s because it makes him feel good.” He then remarks, looking down to the side, “It’s harder to be happy than to be sad. You wake up and, it’s like, 'I’m sad today.' To get yourself to be happy is such a tremendous hill sometimes.” It’s a disarming piece of wisdom from someone so young, though as McCartney points out, wryly, "My mom's basically a therapist."

McCartney grew up in Northern Ireland. He made his first on-screen appearance in 2019 as a villager burnt alive by a dragon on Game of Thrones. McCartney admits he was an awkward teenager, describing high school as a “gladiator match” because of the bullying he endured.

“I’m a short guy, so I’m already an outlier,” he explains. McCartney’s father, Michael, who is a screenwriter, encouraged his son to pursue acting. So the teen started doing school plays. “Growing up, I never had a group. And when I found acting, I found a lot of people that were ready to believe and to throw away cliques and girlfriends and grades and smoking outside and all that shit that makes you ‘cool.’ When you show up to acting class, if you’re good at acting, that makes you cool.” Acting also helped McCartney find a way to channel his own frustrations and angst. Behind all the pyrotechnics and illusions, McCartney finds that the real magic of doing Stranger Things is its ability to grab the audience's emotions, to make them root for the characters (even want to fight Vecna) and believe that what they're seeing on the stage is real.

"I actually find a lot of release in it. It's very cathartic," he says. "That's the nature of acting, is to believe in something else, other than you. So in turn, you're releasing all your present-day emotions. Because if I'm being somebody else, and I'm not myself anymore, I have nothing else to hold on to from that day—if I give myself up completely to the job at the end of three hours, I don't know what was going on. I forget everything. It's nice, because then all you have is the performance. And when you give yourself 100 percent, you get so much out of it."

And that craft has taken him an ocean away from home. But if McCartney feels homesick, he doesn’t let on. He loves New York and its theatre community, where “everybody has a heart, and [is] not afraid to show it.”

He was also given a boost of confidence when screen actor Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays Vecna in the Stranger Things series, came to the play on opening night. The two had a heart-to-heart backstage about the character. "It was nice for me because he agreed with my thoughts...he basically gave me the stamp of approval that night." He then smiles proudly, adding, "He was just really happy to hear that I was having a good time, and he loved the play, and he loved my portrayal of Henry Creel. And that was enough. That was all I needed." McCartney was a fan of the series before he even auditioned for it, and he continues to be. When the play started showing the Stranger Things season five trailer after the play ended, McCartney joked to the stage management team, "Can I go out there? Because I'm not performing anymore, and we just took the bows, so like, can I go out there and just watch the trailer?"

Juan Carlos, Gabrielle Nevaeh, Louis McCartney, Alison Jaye, and Burke Swanson Andy Henderson

He doesn't do that, and he can't reveal what's next for the residents of Hawkins (Stranger Things season five will premiere on Netflix November 26). But for this talented, hungry 21-year-old, it's clear his career is just beginning. McCartney's dream is to keep moving between the stage and the screen, and to continue playing with genre storytelling: "I would love to do the Eragon series if that ever gets made," he says immediately when asked about his dream gig.

For right now though, McCartney is eager to keep doing Stranger Things and keep refining his performance. When asked why he loves acting, the actor puts his heart on his sleeve: “It’s the only thing that makes me happy. I couldn’t live without it. I couldn’t breathe without it. I know a lot of people say that, but I literally find so much happiness in it. I think it’s a statement in and of itself, that I’ve done this 500 times already, and I’m more than happy to do it 500 more times.”