Drive around Atlanta, Georgia, long enough and the city starts to feel flat, crisscrossed with highways and personal injury lawyer billboards, home to Walmarts the size of football fields. This is, improbably, where Millie Bobby Brown – Stranger Things star, Netflix golden goose and self-made lifestyle millionaire – has chosen to base herself. “I’m so sorry,” Brown says as she strides into the coffee shop, one of a local hipster chain, where we were meant to meet 20 minutes ago. She was in dance rehearsals at a gargantuan film studio complex nearby, which was also home to the sprawling Stranger Things set for the last decade. Brown is gleefully schtum about the project requiring the sweat-tastic routine: “I have something in the pipeline that I’m really excited about, which I’ve never done before – that’ll be next year!”
In a Garage sports bra, black shorts and hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looks like any 21-year-old Pilates girlie fresh from a reformer class. At least, that’s until she reaches for a bottle of water from the barista and reveals the tiny tattoo on her wrist – the numbers “011” in a delicate font. That would be a reference to Eleven from Stranger Things – a telekinetic, shorn-headed adolescent locked in battle with the forces of evil, aided by a motley crew of gung-ho kids and world-weary adults – the character that propelled Brown from child actor to global megastar.
Named by Variety as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, the ’80s sci-fi horror is set in suburban Hawkins, Indiana, a fictional town that happens to be a gateway to another dimension called the Upside Down, through which all kinds of devilish creatures worm their way into our world. Every season since its premiere in 2016, Stranger Things has smashed Netflix viewership records, facilitating the company’s emergence as the all-conquering streaming platform it is today. And all that success would be impossible without Brown who, despite being cast at the tender age of 10, helmed the ensemble show with preternatural confidence.
In person, she has a warm but briskly no-nonsense demeanour that strongly reminds me of a head girl who gets shit done. She’s already achieved an awful lot at 21: in addition to Stranger Things, she’s starred in numerous Netflix movies, founded an animal shelter called Joey’s Friends, set up the production company PCMA to handle her film projects and launched the Florence By Mills beauty brand, which has branched out into fragrance, clothing, eyewear, pet apparel and coffee. You can find her sunglasses in Specsavers, buy her sweatpants in Nordstrom and swipe on her lip gloss in Boots or Ulta Beauty. For a certain segment of Gen Z girls, Brown is less associated with Eleven and more synonymous with cosy relatability – like a cool, down-to-earth big sister, albeit one with more than 64 million Instagram followers.
Today, Brown is in a reflective mood about the end of the show that catapulted her to stardom. “It’s like a death of someone you love,” she muses, tucking herself into the leather armchair opposite me. The platinum blonde hairdo responsible for countless tabloid hit jobs this year about how “old” she looked – more on that later – has been dyed back to its typical mahogany. “I was 10 when I started, so this is like a family to me; not just the cast, not just the crew, but the entity of Stranger Things.”
“She’s a true talent,” Adolescence director Philip Barantini tells me over the phone from LA. The pair worked together on the forthcoming Enola Holmes 3, which Brown produced and stars in as its cheeky, fourth wall-breaking titular detective. “I thought she was absolutely mind-blowing as an actress,” he says of her Stranger Things debut. “To be able to do what she had to do in that show at that age – it was just magnificent.”
“Millie is one of those people that if she believes she can do it, you better watch out because it’s going to happen,” says her Stranger Things costar Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays the terrifying antagonist Vecna. “The self-belief is so present. I think that’s one of the reasons why we all love her because, God, don’t we all wish we were like that all the time?”
Over four seasons, the show has accumulated hundreds of millions of views; spawned a West End and Broadway incarnation, an animated series, countless novels and comic books; and is now about to release its fifth and final season. The stakes have never been higher: all life in Hawkins is now threatened by the Upside Down. The stakes for Brown are similarly stratospheric: with the looming finale of the show, how will this young actor navigate the journey from prodigious child stardom to adulthood?
Twenty pages into reading the script for the final episode, Brown began sobbing. At the table reading, she says, “all of us kids” – that is, actors Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink and Caleb McLaughlin, all of whom had been cast as children too – spontaneously embraced in a tear-sodden group hug. “We were all each other knew,” she says. “We just all huddled and cried for five minutes straight.”
You would think that Brown would be on the next plane out of Atlanta once the show wrapped, to buzzy New York or network-y Los Angeles. Instead she’s eschewed Hollywood and put down even deeper roots. She lives on a farm with her husband, actor and producer Jake Bongiovi, son of Jon Bon Jovi, alongside what the animal lover describes as a “petting zoo”-esque collection of 11 dogs, four cats and around 40 farm animals. “I had a 200-pound sheep in my house at one point,” she says. “He was ripping my curtains down.” Those arresting chocolate labrador eyes fix on mine when I ask: why stay? “I grew up here, you know?” she replies evenly. “This is the longest place I’ve been consecutively in my life because of Stranger Things. For me, this is my home.”
A week after we meet, Brown’s desire to nest suddenly makes even more sense: she and her husband have adopted a baby, a daughter, news that she announces to internet-breaking effect via Instagram (it certainly explains why, when I asked what the future had in store for them, Brown immediately answered “definitely kids”). This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to any Millie-heads (her legion of fans don’t have an actual name, so let’s just roll with it) who listened to her on the Smartless showbiz podcast earlier this year. “I really want a big family – I’m one of four; he’s one of four,” she said, adding coyly: “I don’t see having your own child, you know, as really any different [than] adopting.”
“It’s been a beautiful, amazing journey – she’s taught us so much already,” Brown says, beaming over Zoom from home, when we catch up again a few weeks later, once she and Jake have emerged from the new baby haze. “Perspective is a huge thing. The smaller things in life are so much more precious. Our days are filled with lots of cuddles and laughter and love. It’s just endless joy.” Who’s on nappy duty most? “We are 50-50 on everything. That’s why I’m so grateful to have partnered with him in this life – he is just the most amazing dad.”
It sounds as though Brown is someone who has a good blueprint for family life. Despite her charmingly skewwhiff transatlantic accent, this is an English girl at heart, whose family – the branch from Salisbury, at least – were better known for selling fruit and veg in the local market. Her father, who now manages Brown and helps run PCMA, grew up flogging produce. “My dad still says those phrases,” she says, laughing. “When we’re cooking, he’ll be like, ‘£2 for a cabbage! £2 for a cabbage!’” On her mother’s side, Brown is pure East End – her grandmother was born and raised on a council estate in Bethnal Green, London, where Brown spent most summers. She describes herself as an inveterate “Velcro child”, who genuinely loves being around her parents, and says, “Every decision I make in my career, I still consult them.”
Money was tight, but Mr and Mrs Brown raised an enviously tightknit brood – she is one of four siblings – which they moved around the world with enthusiastic derring-do. She was born in Marbella, Spain, before the family moved to the UK, then Florida. “My parents don’t like the same thing for too long,” she says of the rambunctious Brown family. “When you walk into our house, everyone’s yelling, screaming, singing Hamilton… Truly” – “truly” is one of Brown’s favourite words – “you have to really keep up with it. But growing up in a household like that, there was so much love and fun and humour.”
In Florida, Brown signed up for classes in dancing, acting and modelling. “I was always talking and they were like, ‘Please shut up and take a picture,’” she says, laughing. She grew up watching Disney Channel shows such as Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place, but acting wasn’t an early interest. Yet this is where Brown reveals a skill that would put her in the running to play the supernaturally gifted Eleven: “I actually have a photographic memory and was learning things very, very quickly. I started realising that I loved that [acting] the most, that was top priority.” Excuse me? I marvel at her powers of memory. Brown nods. Apparently it runs in the family – her London cabbie granddad studied for the notoriously difficult Knowledge test in six months. “My little sister’s the same way. I didn’t know I had it until somebody said, ‘How do you learn your lines?’ And I said, ‘Well, I just see it.’” Like your brain takes a picture, I suggest. “Yeah! Exactly.”
When a teacher told Brown that LA was the place to be for acting, Brown marched home and told her parents with the overconfidence of an eight-year-old, “I’m gonna make it if you take me to LA.” The family had zero industry connections – her father was in property by then, while her mother was staying home to look after the kids. “My mum was like” – Brown adopts an exasperated parental voice – “‘Millie…’ My dad was like, ‘OK! Let’s go.’ The next week we left.” That’s quite a leap of faith in one’s daughter, I say. “He still sees things in me,” she tells me. “I’ll say, ‘I want to get my rescue licence for my dogs.’ My dad’s like, ‘I know you’re gonna do it.’ He just instilled so much faith in me that I believed in myself from a very young age.”
Those early years in Hollywood were not kind to young Millie; bit parts in NCIS and Modern Family kept her going. “I don’t think I realised how much rejection was waiting for me,” Brown says. A casting director told her she would never make it; she was “too mature” for the screen. Crushed, she decided to quit but tried out for one last show, which was – you guessed it – Stranger Things. When she flew out with her father for the final audition, she found herself visited by mystical portents. “I sat on row 11 of the plane, seat 11… Then we got to the hotel, they put us on the 11th floor. It was all very – for me, anyway – still very strange.” She got the role the day she was due to fly home.
As the final season hits screens in a staggered release this November and December, it’s difficult to overstate how important Stranger Things has been for Netflix. It proved that a streamer could mint genuine stars and that its shows could be both critical darlings and commercial successes. Brown has since gone on to front a string of Netflix projects, including the Enola Holmes franchise, the dragon-slaying adventure fantasy Damsel and The Electric State, a sci-fi caper set in an alternative 1990 where robots and humans are at war. “Stranger Things has made a massive cultural impact, and, with Eleven, Millie brought a character to the screen who will be remembered forever,” Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria tells me. “She’s become an indelible part of the Netflix family.” (Brown is currently in the middle of a press tour for the show, with the added complexity that her longtime costar David Harbour is at the centre of intense speculation surrounding his personal life and working relationships.)
Moving to Georgia, rather than commuting in from Hollywood, for the duration of the show was a deliberate choice by Brown’s parents. “They didn’t want me to grow up in that world,” she says. Brown has a resolutely unstarry group of Atlanta friends: the neighbourhood vets, coffee shop owners, dog rescue volunteers, people in retail and finance. “I love what I do but it doesn’t define me,” she says of acting. “You have a sense of purpose within your own personal life.” Nevertheless she couldn’t be protected from all the darker pitfalls of fame. Stranger Things was a crash course in growing up in the public eye. She has been picked apart online since she was a child: her behaviour around her co-stars deemed pushy, her accent veering too wildly between British and American. She was relentlessly sexualised in the press and tailed by paparazzi. On one occasion, photographers chased her into a lift and surrounded her. “I was really upset, and the flashing lights were everywhere, and it was really scary,” she says. For the first time in our conversation, Brown sounds downbeat and vulnerable. “I remember after that being like, this feels really wrong and weird.” She was only 13.
When Brown turned 16, she posted an Instagram video of nasty headlines and inappropriate comments from her years in the spotlight, calling for more “kindness and support” for children. This year, she marked 21 with another video, in which she sombrely called out four Daily Mail journalists by name for blasting her appearance and speculating about plastic surgery in the middle of her press tour for The Electric State. One headline read: “Why are Gen Zers like Millie Bobby Brown ageing so badly?” As she put it in the clip: “For some reason people can’t seem to grow up with me. Instead, they act like I’m supposed to stay frozen in time… And because I don’t, I’m now a target.”
Today, Brown sums up the reporting and the subsequent online dogpiling with grim humour: “‘Oh my God, what has she done with her face? Why has she gone blonde? She looks 60 years old!’” Now she leans in close, speaking with the declarative passion of someone with a lot to get off her chest. “I respect journalism. I love reading articles on my favourite people and hearing what they’re up to. I understand that there’s paparazzi, even though it’s invasive, even though it feels like shit to me – I know that’s your job… But don’t, in your headline, slam me at the get-go. It is so wrong and it is bullying, especially to young girls who are new to this industry and are already questioning everything about it.”
The worst thing was that Brown was excited for the press tour. As someone whose everyday style is heavy on farm-friendly dungarees and Crocs, she wanted this red carpet to be a source of escapist fun. In honour of the film’s ’90s theme, Brown and her stylist, Ryan Young, called in favours from Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson to borrow some of their most iconic outfits from the decade. Hence the Baywatch-blonde dye job; hence the glammed-up frocks. After the savage press coverage, “I was depressed for three, four days. I was crying every day,” Brown says. When she went to London to present an award to Sabrina Carpenter at the Brit Awards, “I was crying while I was getting my hair and make-up done. I was even welling up when I saw her backstage.” The “Manchild” singer – no stranger to internet pile-ons herself – hugged her and issued some much-needed advice: “Truly, always, her mentality is very much like ‘Fuck ’em’, which I knew inside of me, but when you hear someone else say it, you’re like, ‘Yes! That’s it!’”
Brown recorded her video the very next day. “If me being blonde or wearing more make-up really bothers you, I’m going to address it – not just for myself, but for every other girl who wants to try a new hairstyle or wear a red lip,” she says now, anger bristling in her voice for the first time. “It’s, like, get off my fucking case, you know? I am 21. I am going to have fun and play and be myself.”
Then she squares her shoulders and reminds me why she was named Unicef’s youngest ever Goodwill Ambassador at the age of 14. “I can’t silence the 500 million people behind their phones,” she says. “So what is the realistic route here? I think it’s just uplift and empower young people. Can we fight back harder? Can we instil self-love and confidence into girls to be able to believe in themselves no matter what anyone says? That I can do. That I will do.” Brown’s video was liked more than 7.5 million times and prompted an outpouring of support and, sure enough, The Daily Mail executed a quick U-turn. “Three weeks after,” Brown says, shaking her head in disbelief, “they were like, ‘Millie stuns in this dress.’ How do you change your mind that quickly?”
You can see why Brown prefers the quiet life in Georgia with her husband, away from the burning lights and intense scrutiny of show business. It’s not uncommon for Brown, who is finishing a veterinary technician degree, to drive out late at night, rescue a dog, bathe it at home and let it sleep in her and Bongiovi’s bed. “We had to stop at one point because there were just so many,” she says. “It was like we weren’t even sleeping because they were getting such good rest!”
Has Bongiovi ever asked her to, er, quit with all the dogs in the bed? “No! Literally never,” she says with a laugh. “He just lets me be me. That’s why I adore him.” The pair met in 2021 through a mutual friend, who knew Bongiovi through college, and Brown cold called him on a whim after he shared his number. “I thought he was so cute, but I didn’t know if he liked me or not,” she says with a giggle, lightness seeping back into her voice. They FaceTimed and texted, eventually meeting up in person a month later.
Three years later, they were walking down the aisle: first in a small, intimate affair in May 2024 and then in a gloriously romantic Tuscan wedding in September last year, officiated by Matthew Modine, who plays the part of a scientist and father-figure to Brown in Stranger Things.
At the time she was 20 and Bongiovi was a year older. “I understood I was young – I know that,” she says. “I truly just can’t say it enough: when you meet that person, you know it.” There are good examples of this kismet on both sides of their families: Bongiovi’s own parents are high-school sweethearts, while Brown’s met when they were 19 and 21.
When I ask her what differentiated Bongiovi from boyfriends of the past, Brown launches misty-eyed into a Hallmark-ready ode to her husband (the words “beautiful angel” are used). “I am so different from him,” she says, really considering the point. “I don’t see the best in everyone. I’m always like, ‘What are your intentions?’ because I’ve been jaded by the industry. Now I’m able to really see…” she trails off. “I’m allowing myself to be less reserved in that world.”
Although, a few weeks later, when I ask her to tell me a little about her baby’s personality, Brown pushes back with a flash of the same fiery conviction I saw in Atlanta. “I’m not going to,” she says simply. “For me, it’s really important to protect her and her story until she’s old enough to potentially one day share it herself,” she adds firmly. “It’s not my place to purposefully put her in the spotlight unwillingly. If she chooses to share her personality one day with the world, like I did when I was young, that’s something we’d support. But right now, as she’s so little…” She pauses. “As her parents, it’s our job to protect her from that.” In fact, there are no plans to even disclose her name until “she’s ready to decide for herself”.
If it seems like Brown is fast forwarding through all the traditional markers of adulthood, she is also self-aware enough to clock it – and determined to press ahead regardless. “I’m 21,” Brown tells me back in the coffee shop. “I’ve still got so much more in me. I treat every day like it’s going to disappear.” Already, the internet peanut gallery is awash with comments that she is too young and too famous to be a good adoptive parent. But then I recall what she said of the uproar around her appearance: “If I’m gonna be your punching bag, it’s almost like I’m the right person for it. Because I don’t care anymore.”
The grit may have been baked into Brown since year dot, but it isn’t all that she is. She’s brimming with warmth too. The same entrepreneur who set up Florence by Mills cooks a mean Sunday roast every weekend and tends tirelessly to her animals. She bats away the endless online accusations that she is some sort of gender-traitor tradwife. “I’m picking up horseshit,” she says with a shrug. “There’s a very big difference in that.”
She’s also the friend who, according to Campbell Bower, will text him apropos of nothing to say, “Hey! Love you.” She’s also the disciplined actor who, Barantini says, turned up on set on her rare days off and sat next to him on producing duties. She’s the partner who is clearly head over heels for her husband. Now she’s a mother as well.
I’m sure the world will have plenty more to say about that in the coming years, and not all of it will be good. Will she let it get to her or sway her from the unerring, inimitable path she’s carved out thus far? Surely the latter. I only worry Brown might wear herself out – but she assures me she’s all good. She’s still running on “excitement and adrenaline”, she says of becoming a mother and releasing the biggest show in television history in the space of four months. Then, ever self-aware, she allows herself a small, knowing sigh. “But maybe ask me again in six months.”
Volume 1 of the final season of Stranger Things is on Netflix from 26 November.
Cover look: hand-knitted cashmere dress, McQueen. Hair: Shon Hyungsun Ju. Make-up: Rebecca Wordingham. Nails: Robbie Tomkins. Prop styling: Thomas Conant. Production: Petty Cash.