Millie Bobby Brown is 22 now, and she started playing Eleven on Stranger Things when she was 10. Suffice to say the show has been an immense part of her life so far; while she’s popped up in other Netflix projects, including the Enola Holmes films, she’ll forever be associated with that superpowered little girl in Hawkins, Indiana. Looking back, Brown has realized just how much of an emotional attachment she had, and will always have, to the show and the character.
At a live recording of the Happy Sad Confused podcast reported on by Variety, Brown said that after the series finale of Stranger Things dropped in January, she felt a bit lost—no doubt the result of, for the first time in over a decade, not having another season of the show in her future.
“I went into a little bit of a slight, slight depression. It was very hard for me. I would not have expected that coming off of the show. I’m a very happy-go-lucky person,” she said. She also told Happy Sad Confused host Josh Horowitz that she felt the urge to reach out to her Stranger Things co-stars.
“They probably thought I was crazy. I was like, ‘We’re still friends, right? Like, you’re not gonna stop talking to me anymore?’ I was like, ‘I’m sorry if I ever upset you,’ and was just trying to mend anything,” Brown said. “‘It’s been 10 years, and I really want to be friends. You’re my sibling.’ And then I was on the beach; it was beautiful, and I just sat there crying. It was a very hard time for me.”
As for Eleven’s ultimate fate—something many of her co-stars have also addressed—Brown goes against the general consensus that her character sacrificed herself in the Upside Down. Brown, it seems, has hope that Eleven might actually be out there, hiking through those waterfall-filled landscapes. “All people say now is, ‘Do you believe?’ And of course I believe. I have to believe,” she said.
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