Millie Bobby Brown isn’t Eleven anymore. After ten years of facing monsters, the actor has finally finished her run as the Stranger Things hero. “I know I’ll never play her again,” she says wistfully. But she isn’t really saying goodbye to the character: “[Eleven] has influenced me in huge ways. She is a force to be reckoned with, who gave me a lot of confidence to be a hero within my own life.”
That self-assurance motivated Brown to launch Florence by Mills in 2019. “Naturally, [that role] gives you the confidence to be like, ‘Yeah, I might not know everything about skin care and beauty, but I’m going to build a company at 15.’” Since the start of the Netflix show, Brown, now 21, has also starred in the Enola Holmes and Godzilla films. She got married (to Jake Bongiovi) last year and recently adopted a baby girl. She isn’t even Millie Bobby Brown anymore, if you want to get technical. Legally, she’s Millie Bonnie Bongiovi.
Despite the internet’s resistance to the idea, she’s grown up and firmly in her “most authentic era,” which she attributes to motherhood. “Being a mother expedited this version of me,” she says. “Nothing could get in the way of me being who I need to be for my daughter.”
With the addition to her family, self-care has become even more important in her routine. “I want her to see me take care of myself,” she says, but she doesn’t mean indulgences like lengthy facial massages. “You have to do everything ten times quicker, and you don’t really get to do your gua sha in the morning.” Instead, self-care takes the form of more frequent check-ins with herself and her loved ones.
She journals regularly and she’s careful not to be self-deprecating, conscious of the example she sets for her daughter. “I have to talk to myself kindly,” she says, explaining that it can be easy to “talk badly about yourself and your body” if you’re not being mindful. “After becoming a parent, I couldn’t imagine talking about myself like that anymore, because she’s going to watch me do that.”
Brown also says it can be a reflex to shrink yourself for others, admitting she’s done so before. “Women naturally kind of become smaller so that men feel bigger,” she says, before adding that she can’t see herself doing this anymore for the same reason—her daughter.
