Turn it up to Eleven
How Millie Bobby Brown went from a British schoolgirl nobody had heard of six months ago to the global brand that she is today
If you find articles headlined, “30 odious hotshots under the age of 30” depressing enough, you might want to look away now. Millie Bobby Brown is just 12 years old, but the Britishborn not-even-a-teenager has already become an international star and global phenomenon. Last week, the Netflix drama Stranger Things won big at the Screen Actors’ Guild awards in Los Angeles, with Millie Bobby Brown nominated for outstanding performance by a female actor for her role as the mysterious, shaven-haired Eleven.
This came just a week after the actress, who attended Pokesdown Community Primary School in Bournemouth, also joined the likes of Christy Turlington, Brooke Shields and Kate Moss as a “face” for Calvin Klein — a sure sign that she has very much become the face of 2017, too.
As Stranger Things notched up 8.2 million viewers in the fortnight following its July release, and garnered accolades from Steven Spielberg for being the “best show of the year”, it isn’t any surprise that people are now talking about the “Eleven Effect” in fashion, and bestowing “iconic status” on its young star.
However, even if her fame seemed to arrive overnight, few fans know just how much work behind the scenes went into establishing Millie Bobby Brown as the global brand she is today.
Born in Marbella where her British parents Kelly and Robert Brown had gone to join her grandparents, who ran a restaurant, Millie is the third of four children. But, as her father recalled in a recent interview, there was something about his daughter that immediately struck him as different. “My other children would watch cartoons, but Mill watched musicals — Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Annie and Bugsy
Malone. She’d belt out a tune. She was performing from day one.”
When Millie was four, the family left Spain and moved to Bournemouth, where her father worked as an estate agent. But when another opportunity opened for the family to relocate to Orlando, Florida, to set up a tooth-whitening business, no one could have predicted what a life-changing decision it would be for them all.
Then eight years old, and uprooted from her British primary school, Millie perfected her American accent by watching Disney movies, and began attending a stage school. Four hours every Saturday were spent acting, dancing and singing. After a showcase performance, an agent spotted her talent and approached the family offering to represent her.
Kelly and Robert’s faith in Millie was so great that soon after, on the advice of the agent, the Brown family left Orlando for Los Angeles where there would be even more opportunities for her. By all accounts the Brown family had always been gung-ho in their business decisions and unafraid to up sticks, but moving a family of six for a punt in a notoriously fickle, competitive and ruthless industry was a
bold move by anyone’s standards. “It was very hard,” said Millie. “There were lots of tears along the way.” Things got so desperate that at one point her British-born manager, Melanie Greene, is reported even to have lent the family money. “My older sister left. She didn’t want to do it [America] any more,” Millie recalled. “It was tears, tears, tears. We went through tough times.”
MISSING THE BIG ROLES
Greene, however, was rightly convinced that Millie was a “natural,” but although she landed small parts in hit shows such as Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy, she kept missing out on the big starring roles, like Spielberg’s BFG.
By the summer of 2015, it looked as if the family’s gamble had been a serious misjudgement, and as money became tighter, with the big jobs eluding their stage-struck daughter, the Browns gave up and moved back to Britain and in with Millie’s aunt. “I was devastated. I wasn’t getting work. I thought I was done,” Millie told one interviewer.
However, she and her family weren’t ready to give up just yet. They kept on her agent who continued to put her forward for parts, often doing first-round introductions and pre-auditions via Skype. The same day that a casting agent made her cry by saying she was “too mature and grown-up” for a part, she auditioned for Stranger Things. When she landed the part, little did she know it would be the breakout role she had been dreaming about — all she knew was that she would have to shave her hair.
The cast were kept in the dark about the plot of the show, auditioning with “dummy sides”. But the signs were already there that this unapologetically nostalgic show, set in the Eighties, and referencing TV shows made more than two decades before Millie was born, was going to be a huge hit. “They told me to watch Poltergeist, Stand By Me and The
Goonies,” says Millie. “And basically, if you put that in a blender, you get Stranger
Things. But they told me that the performance they wanted me to resemble was E.T.”
With the success of the show and her role in it recognised, today, Millie is seated in the front row at New York Fashion Week. Three days ago, news landed of her first major film role, starring in the
Godzilla sequel, due for release in March 2019.
Within the industry, her work ethic and brand-building acumen have become legendary. Not content to stay out of the limelight until season two of Stranger
Things rolls around, Millie has kept her name in the headlines with a YouTube channel where she posts cover versions of Amy Winehouse ballads and Nicki Minaj raps, and has amassed 1.5 million followers on Instagram.
Not since Tavi Gevinson, the fashion blogger turned editor turned actress, who also shot to fame at the age of 12, have we seen such shrewd empire-building skills in someone so young. This is how a British schoolgirl nobody had heard of six months ago can now command over £3 million (Dh13 million) per movie. Her team still comprises the same manager, Melanie Green, and her family, who can now sit back in the knowledge they were right to back their daughter’s ambition.
Her 19-year-old brother Charlie looks after her Twitter account, 23-year-old sister Paige, who works for Nationwide building society, is in charge of Instagram and her aunt runs Millie’s YouTube channel.
She turns to her father Robert (“who has a great American accent and knows all of the characters”) when she needs to practise her lines, and to her mother for her outfits. “It’s really fun to have them along on the journey to experience things with me — I wouldn’t be here today without their support,” she told Vogue magazine.
Of course, her British roots are never too far away, and she charms her fanbase with regular comments about her support for Liverpool FC. As one commentator put it: “She has that unquantifiable star quality, the kind of presence some actors take a lifetime to acquire. She is also extremely talented and hardworking but, above all else, exceedingly driven, ambitious and determined.
“She may only be 12, but Millie and her team have a very focused career plan in place, and the world really is her oyster.”
“My other children would watch cartoons, but Mill watched musicals — Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Annie and Bugsy Malone. She’d belt out a tune. She was performing from day one.”