Millie Bobby Brown Is Done With the Kid Stuff

By Emma Chance | Film | October 17, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | Film | October 17, 2023 |

Millie Bobbie Brown has accomplished more in her nineteen years than I hope to accomplish in a lifetime. The Stranger Things star also runs a beauty brand, Florence by Mills, and a production company PCMA, which produced the Enola Holmes franchise. She is currently studying human services at Purdue University, and oh yeah, she also published a novel. But according to Brown herself, her “greatest accomplishment as a woman” is being her “grandmother’s granddaughter.”

In a recent interview with Glamour as the magazine’s Women of the Year 2023 global honoree, Brown opened up about her changing career. The thing that struck me about the interview, beyond the silly statements like, “I’m somebody who wakes up, drinks a kombucha, pets my donkey, you know?” is that, no matter how hard she tries to convince us otherwise, this is a kid. She pushes her dog around in a baby carriage in case of panic attacks. The first thing she said to the interviewer was, “I feel like shit today” because she had a “huge pimple on my face.”

Brown came of age as a mega-star in the streaming era when the usual scrutinization of women (and young women especially) in entertainment was amplified by social media. She was often ridiculed for talking over costars and being too loud on Stranger Things press tours. She, unfortunately, internalized the criticism.

“It’s hard to hear that at 13. You’re like, ‘I don’t want to ever talk again. I don’t want to be the loud person. In interviews I couldn’t help but think of all the comments. So I just remembered to stay silent and speak when I was spoken to, even though I was dying to join in. I just felt it wasn’t my turn.”

That’s part of the reason she fell so hard for her fiancé, Jake Bongiovi. “When I met Jake, I just felt I could be loud,” she said. “He embraced that and encouraged that. And I fell in love with myself while being with him.”

Now she’s concerned with protecting the child stars coming up after her. “You cannot speak on children that are underage. I mean, our brains physically have not grown yet,” she said. She said she protects her own self-esteem by building a proverbial fence. “This is my life, and the only people that are allowed are the people that I open the gate for.”

She’s at an interesting moment in her career. With Stranger Things ending—the fifth and final season will air on Netflix sometime in 2025—she’s ready to move on. “Stranger Things takes up a lot of time to film and it’s preventing me from creating stories that I’m passionate about. So I’m ready to say, ‘Thank you, and goodbye.’” She acknowledges that the show gave her “the tools and the resources to be a better actor.”

I for one am excited to see what she does next.