Eggos and ‘Stranger Things’
Millie Bobby Brown dishes on Eleven’s Season 2
The new season of Stranger Things is one of change for Eleven, who has a new haircut, a new adopted family and a new potty-mouthed vocabulary of slang words.
But if there’s one constant for the heroine, it’s her perpetual love of Eggo waffles, which she eats for breakfast daily and later steals from a gas station as she explores her bad side in nine new episodes (now streaming on Netflix).
It’s one of the many ways that Emmy nominee Millie Bobby Brown, the young British actress and the show’s breakout star, is different from her supernatural character.
“I think the Eggos are just something that fans of the show like,” says Brown, 13. “Eggos are an American thing and my British family is like, ‘ We don’t know what that is.’
“I don’t really care (about them),” she adds. “I’m just optimistic about the taste. I get positive vibes.”
Eleven has anything but positive vibes in the darker new chapter of Stranger Things, which picks up as the telekinetic girl remains trapped inside the kooky alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. After managing to escape, she’s taken in by local police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour), who hides her in a remote cabin from government agents investigating the lab where she was subjected to terrifying experiments.
Series creators Matt and Ross Duffer wanted to separate Eleven from her nerdy buddies so that she could go on her own journey this year.
“We had a feeling that (Hopper and Eleven) would be really electric together,” says Ross Duffer. “A lot of the success of Season 1 depended on her interactions with the boys.” With them on their own adventures, Eleven’s story line “was immediately exciting. It started to give the second season a different feel.”
Frustrated after nearly a year sheltered indoors, Eleven lashes out at Hopper and runs away. She finds her longlost biological mom (Aimee Mullins), rendered speechless by electroshock treatments after her daughter was forcibly taken from her as a toddler by scientists.
Jane — Eleven’s newly discovered birth name — then travels to Chicago, where she meets her “sister,” Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), who also has psychic abilities. Eight and her motley crew of punk vigilantes convince Jane/Eleven to channel her anger, and use her powers to seek revenge on criminals, giving her a rock-chic makeover of slickedback hair and dark eyeliner.
“That was a fun storyline, because she really didn’t understand what they were doing to her,” Brown says. “In Season 1, the interior of Eleven is badass, and then in the second, the exterior is, also.”
After nearly killing a man, Eleven decides to go home to Hawkins, Ind., now under attack by the gargantuan Mind Flayer monster. Reconciling with Hopper, she returns to the lab and uses her mind to close the gate to the Upside Down from which the monster emerged.
Shooting those mystical scenes, “I’m honestly just thinking about what I’m eating next,” Brown says. “I don’t think too deeply (about) my scenes. I just read the scripts and think about what Eleven is going through.”
In the last scene of the season, Eleven reunites with brave youngster Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and locks lips with him at a middle-school dance. Although she trusts the Duffers with Stranger’s future plots, the Calvin Klein model and star of the upcoming Godzilla: King of Monsters says she’d like to see her elusive character go to school with the other boys.
“I think she’d use her powers so she could switch up the times and leave ASAP,” Brown says. “That’d come in handy.”
“In Season 1, the interior of Eleven is badass, and then in the second, the exterior is, also.”