Millie Bobby Brown on ‘Stranger Things,’ Marriage, and Life on the Farm

Millie Bobby Brown was 11 when she began playing the icon known as Eleven.

By the time she shot her final scenes as her fierce, committed, and telekinetic character on Stranger Things this past December, she was 20, newly married, and living on a farm in Georgia. Some days she bottle-fed a baby goat in her trailer. Many days she brought her foster dogs to work, which the cast and crew lovingly welcomed. There was also a lot of Wicked—“I’m a big musical girl,” Brown says—which the show’s creators recall a little less tenderly.

“She asked us to play ‘Defying Gravity’ while she was hovering midair in a harness so she could pretend to fly like Elphaba,” says Matt Duffer, who created the show with his brother, Ross. “Not just because she loves the song, but because she knows it drives us a little crazy.” But the bosses forgave her rapid. “As soon as the camera rolls—barely a second before—that silliness vanishes and she just…transforms into Eleven.”

Millie Bobby Brown’s clothing, shoes, bow tie, and cummerbund by Celine by Hedi Slimane; tights by Wolford.PHOTOGRAPH BY SØLVE SUNDSBØ; STYLED BY GEORGE CORTINA.

Brown’s veil by Lynn Paik; sunglasses by Louis Vuitton.PHOTOGRAPH BY SØLVE SUNDSBØ; STYLED BY GEORGE CORTINA.

Now that Stranger Things has wrapped—the final season will air this year—Brown is cruising at a very comfortable altitude: She has a beloved role on her résumé that isn’t likely to weigh her down or define her in the 60 or so years she has left as an actor if she goes full-on Dame Judi Dench. Yes, the show has been one of the biggest phenomenons of the streaming era. Yes, it’s the answer to the question “How did Netflix survive 2022 when nearly a million subscribers jumped ship?” And yes, Brown was the series’s first breakout star, and Eleven arguably its most indelible creation. But the actor also has a beauty and lifestyle brand called Florence by Mills; an animal rescue organization named Joey’s Friends, which she runs from the farm; a successful, well-loved Sherlockian film franchise in Netflix’s Enola Holmes; and a gripping fresh sci-fi movie called The Electric State, which was directed by the Russo brothers and in which she stars as a spunky grunge heroine thrown into a war between robots and the humans who created them.

In other words: She’s not likely to be pigeonholed, and she definitely won’t get bored.

The combination of Brown’s youth and the rate of her ascendancy—as well as the noxious combination of vile men and the internet—have made for some gritty terrain, and during our interviews she will be straightforward with me about how they’ve infuriated and affected her. Chris Pratt, who stars with her in The Electric State, tells me, “She’s authentic and tough. She’s not a pleaser. She’s very capable of charm, but it’s not her only weapon. She has a point of view and strength that are incredibly watchable.”

And again with the critters: “She had a different rescue animal on set every day!”

Brown’s sprawling farm lies at the end of a winding back road in rural Georgia, behind a thicket of pines. When I pull up to the property on a Tuesday afternoon, she emerges from a stable to greet me with her husband, Jake Bongiovi, an actor, producer, and a son of Jon Bon Jovi. The couple gave love a good name at a petite ceremony in May of last year and had a second, bigger wedding in Tuscany in September. Today, Brown is fresh-faced, wearing a plaid button-down, jeans, and pearl earrings. She introduces me to an assortment of sheep, goats, cows, donkeys—and a slinky tuxedo cat, who sits on a fence post so he can play with the horses.

As it happens, Brown’s therapy dog, Winnie, sits in one of the house’s windows. The actor adopted her five years ago to aid ease her panic attacks, but at the moment Winnie is flailing her paws at the window in a codependent frenzy and seems in need of some emotional support herself. “Winnie is a really good set dog,” Brown says. “If I’m fake crying, she doesn’t get stressed. But when she knows I’m real crying, she gets stressed. She can tell the difference.”

Brown did some real crying during the final season of Stranger Things. In part because of rain, it was a logistically taxing shoot (“We did tonight’s work last night, and last night’s work is gonna happen tonight—it’s so complicated”), but by the time she shot her penultimate scene, the gravity of the series coming to a close finally struck her. “It wasn’t hitting me this entire time—until yesterday,” Brown says. “I was on set, and I was like, ‘Well, I have one more day left.’ And I started crying. I don’t actually like to cry at work. I’m a really emotional person, but I try to stay super strong. It made me feel so uncomfortable. Jake was like, ‘It’s good, you have to get it out!’ and I just started welling up.”

Brown’s mother and father are British, but she was born in Marbella, Spain, where they had moved to be close to her dad’s parents, who’d settled there. As a very teenage child, she had already demonstrated a zest for show tunes. When the family returned to the UK, Brown enrolled in classes for acting, singing, and dancing. (Her father, Robert, worked in real estate at the time; her mother, Kelly, was a stay-at-home parent.) “My dream was to be Hannah Montana,” she says. “I loved Hairspray and Mamma Mia!”

When Brown was eight, the family moved again—this time to Orlando, where her parents launched a teeth-whitening business. After her acting started to gain momentum, they moved to Hollywood to support her nascent career, and she landed bit parts on NCIS, Modern Family, and Grey’s Anatomy. But the opportunities stopped knocking, and they returned to the UK. Brown’s parents urged her to make an audition tape for Stranger Things before she gave up all hope. In 2015 she landed the role of a psychokinetic child raised in a laboratory, named after the number tattooed on her wrist, and befriended by neighborhood kids.

Apart from nailing the great Goonies-inflected eccentricities core to Stranger Things’s success, Brown managed to capture the clumsy inelegance of real-life adolescence while simultaneously undergoing it. “I implemented what I was learning as a child, or what I was going through, into her,” she says. “Eleven’s identity was a huge thing that we were kind of fighting with. Is she going to dress as a girl? Or is she gonna dress in the shirts of her adoptive father, Hopper? Or is she gonna be what her friends are helping her to be? At that time in my life, I didn’t know what I wanted to look like, if I preferred more feminine looks, more masculine looks, more androgynous, more grunge. So I implemented that confusion.”

Coat by Sportmax.PHOTOGRAPH BY SØLVE SUNDSBØ; STYLED BY GEORGE CORTINA.

Brown quickly started diversifying her work to ensure that her career would outlast her phenomenal breakthrough. Her business endeavors often nod to her family; in a sense, they’re a reminder of how difficult child stars work, not just for their futures but on behalf of the people they love. When she was 15 Brown cofounded Florence by Mills, a Gen Z–forward brand that offers skin-care products and loungewear, named after her great-grandmother, who had a similarly independent spirit, according to family lore. When she was 19 she coauthored her first novel, Nineteen Steps, inspired by stories her grandmother Ruth told her about the horrific Bethnal Green tube disaster of World War II, when 173 people were killed in the crush to seek shelter from an air raid. Even the name of Brown’s production company, PCMA, is composed of the first initials of the Brown siblings, according to birth order: Paige, Charlie, Millie, Ava.

On top of starring in the ongoing Enola Holmes franchise—Enola is the younger sister of the title to Henry Cavill’s wavy-haired Sherlock—she made 2024’s Damsel, inverting the woman-in-distress trope with a quiver full of arrows and a thirst for revenge, costarring Robin Wright and Angela Bassett. The movie was number one on Netflix in 79 countries.

So Brown is poised to have a very sturdy solo career once she definitively leaves the great pop band that is Stranger Things, starting with The Electric State. But she’ll be taking some scars on the journey, the result of having been renowned and female so teenage.

On a precious day off—and to be fair, it’s not really a day off, because she’s talking to me—Brown and I catch up on a video call. She’s sitting in her kitchen. Her shoulders are tense, and her answers seem wary. Brown pushes back on several questions about growing up with her castmates, reluctant to get drawn into something she believes could be a drama spiral. “I don’t allow many people into my life, and when I do, I think it should be super moderated,” she says. “I started this really young, and I felt that the press specifically was very, very harsh on me. And so I just like to make sure that I’m advocating for myself.”