GLAMOUR’s Women of the Year 2023 global honouree, Millie Bobby Brown, 19, is an award-winning actress, beauty founder, producer, bestselling author and the youngest ever appointed UNICEF Goodwill ambassador. Here, she talks to Jenny Singer about love, learning to speak out, and preparing to say goodbye to the show that made her a global superstar.
It’s June, and Millie Bobby Brown is pushing a baby carriage through the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. The 19-year-old is accompanied by her fiancé, Jake Bongiovi, and a burly but kind security guard. Peeking over the edge of the baby carriage is a caramel-coloured poodle named Winnie. Bongiovi, 21, holds the elevator door open and our whole group—star, fiancé, security, dog, and reporter—piles in.
In a culture that prizes the idea of relatability, celebrities often try to convey that they are, in many ways, ordinary people. But Millie Bobby Brown, bona fide global superstar thanks in no small part to her turn as Eleven in Netflix’s Stranger Things, is undeniably, fabulously not like us. Some stars share luxe get-ready-with-me videos and others preach ultraoptimised morning routines, and then there’s Millie Bobby Brown, who explains how she likes to start her day by saying: “I’m somebody who wakes up, drinks a kombucha, pets my donkey, you know?”
Brown is powerful in a way that is both captivating and occasionally intimidating. She’s not just a singular acting talent but a shrewd businesswoman. With her onscreen work; her international beauty brand, Florence by Mills; and her production company, which already has a hit on its hand with the Enola Holmes franchise, she is building a small empire. And this year she published her first novel.
Brown can be very funny but also achingly earnest. Her parents raised her, she says, to “love hard.” She is devoted to animal rescue work. She is 19-years old, she is getting married, and she is perfectly aware that you and everyone you know think she is too young.
A certain lustre colours everything she does: She is probably the only person at Purdue University—where she is studying online, pursuing a degree in human services—who is hoping to use her classes to bolster her work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
Then there are the aspects of her life that seem glamorous but are, on second glance, painful: She is accompanied by a security guard for her safety. She got Winnie to help comfort her during panic attacks. She’s hit with bouts of crippling insecurity.
“I feel like shit today,” she says once we’re settled in her hotel suite, shoes off, each of us tucked into opposite corners of the couch. She’s wearing grey sweatpants embellished with feathery pink and yellow hearts, plus a zip-up hoodie, and the mystique—for a moment—dissipates.
“I have a huge pimple on my face. And I’m going to go on Instagram, and I’m going to see five different girls that look beautiful! Flawless! Stunning! And, okay, slay,” she says. Inevitably, she adds, she’ll find herself “sobbing, because I know, I know I don’t look like that.”
Brown is endearing and a little unnerving in her willingness to share her struggles, not just her successes. During our conversation (before the SAG-AFTRA strike), she speaks candidly about the basic discomfort of trying to love the parts of yourself that feel the least lovable. She feels no need to hide her vulnerabilities from her fans (of which she has more than 63 million on Instagram alone)—it’s an honour to share herself so fully with the audience of young people who have come of age with her.
“We understand each other,” she says. “We’re just on the same journey.”
As a streaming-era child star, Brown was one of America’s favourite young girls. Like Eleven on Stranger Things, she appeared seemingly overnight, a mesmerising talent whose extraordinary abilities were ineffable and misunderstood. The role was the kind that is rarely written for women or girls: an ultrapowerful protagonist. Her face was plastered on magazine covers; her legs dangled from chairs on late-night shows, where she held her own, rolling her eyes when Jimmy Fallon asked about her first kiss—which was on camera, in Stranger Things.
That she has been able to withstand that kind of scrutiny, and frankly, invasions of her privacy, is in part owed to the fact that Brown is the product of a fierce matriarchy and an inseparable family unit. She was raised in a household where her opinions and ideas were treated as valuable. Her grandmother was her staunchest supporter. Other adults would tell Brown to quiet down, to stop putting on shows and making up stories. “My grandma [would] never tolerate that,” Brown says. She encouraged Brown’s dreams and promised her: “I will never let anyone dull your sparkle.” But press tours are not kind to children and, as Brown grew up in public, she was the target of frequent criticism for such controversial acts as: talking, having an opinion, and being loud while promoting Stranger Things. With forensic precision, YouTubers and bloggers dissected minute moments in group interviews to try to catch Brown interrupting her fellow cast members (“comment ‘MILLIE DID WHAT’ to enter the giveaway,” one YouTube channel crowed).
“We’re kids—we talk over each other,” Brown says now. “I was just penalised for overtalking and oversharing and being too loud.” She was accused of, as she recalls it, “trying to steal the thunder” of her castmates. Grown adults called her “an idiot,” “stupid,” and “a brat.”
“It’s hard to hear that at 13,” she says. “You’re like, ‘I don't want to ever talk again. I don’t want to be the loud person.’” And so she stopped. “In interviews I couldn’t help but think of all the comments. So I just remembered to stay silent and speak when I was spoken to, even though I was dying to join in. I just felt it wasn’t my turn.”
Scrolling through the comments on Brown’s Instagram from that time feels like being trapped in a stress dream—the combination of enormous praise and extreme hate directed at Brown is crushing. On an Instagram post in 2018, when Brown was 14, comments include “How are you so gorgeous” and “You look so bad in that pic though.” One person wrote, “You’re better than all Kardashians combined,” and another snarked, “QUEEN OF CRINGE.”
MBB shared the news with the most adorable photo (and a Taylor Swift lyric).
A powerful young girl is uncanny but exciting. A powerful teenage girl, albeit one with two Emmy nominations, is a threat. Now Brown is becoming a powerful adult woman who has managed to both expand her influence and protect her own emotional well-being.
Just some of what Brown has on deck at the moment: For Nineteen Steps, Brown’s instant New York Times bestseller of a novel, she and her sister conducted interviews with their grandmother about her memories of living through World War II in one of London’s poorest neighbourhoods. It tells the story of a catastrophic 1943 accident and rumoured government coverup; Brown’s grandmother was one of the survivors. At 13, Brown struck her first deal as a movie producer—creating her production company PCMA, named for the Brown children’s initials (Paige, Charlie, Millie, Ava). The Browns run it as a family: Millie and her sister Paige scout books about girls and women to adapt into movies, including the hit Enola Holmes franchise. Florence by Mills, Brown’s skin care and makeup company, is named for her great-grandmother. Her sister-in-law, Rachel Brown, “practically runs the company,” says Millie. “She understands my vision.” Florence by Mills announced it was branching out into coffee in May and released a debut fragrance in August, paving the way for Brown to create her own lifestyle brand. Then there’s her final encore on Stranger Things.
Her drive, she says, is a legacy handed down by her grandmother, her mom, and her dad. “It’s in me. It’s in my blood. I can’t sit still,” she says. “It’s just a part of who I am.”
But while she’s focused on conquering the future, she also feels protective of other child actors who are coming up behind her.
“You cannot speak on children that are underage,” she says. “I mean, our brains physically have not grown yet. To diminish and practically stunt someone’s growth mentally, strip them down, tell them, ‘Hey, listen, you don’t look that great. Why are you wearing that? How dare you think you can wear that? How dare you say that?’”
Brown survived by building a fence around her self-esteem to keep public opinion out. “Nobody’s allowed in,” she says. “Nobody can say shit.
“This is my life, and the only people that are allowed are the people that I open the gate for,” she says. “Other than that, everybody’s out. And yes, it’s sad. There are trust issues. And yes, I have issues with having friends. I don’t have a lot of friends. Yes, I block out a lot of people. I’m a reserved person, socially.”
But she’s resolute. “I will never let that gate open again,” she says. “Because everyone’s crossed it.”
One of the few people who has been allowed to cross that threshold is her fiancé.
Brown and Bongiovi first went public with their romance in March 2022 on the red carpet at the BAFTAs, with Brown later revealing that the pair had initially met on Instagram and were friends for a while before becoming a couple. Today, Brown says that they met after what she describes as “a really…interesting time” in her life. “I was so upset with myself and the decisions I had made,” she says. She is likely referring to her relationship with Hunter Ecimovic, a TikToker whom Brown was previously in an “unhealthy situation with.” Ecimovic had gone on social media and spewed claims about his relationship with Brown, including that he groomed her. Brown has said his comments, which Ecimovic later took back, made her feel “powerless” and “publicly humiliated.”
“I think I was so afraid to be a strong woman in a relationship,” Brown says of her past relationships. Being attractive to men, she thought, meant not taking up too much space.
“When I met Jake,” she says, “I just felt I could be loud. He embraced that and encouraged that. And I fell in love with myself while being with him.”
Still, she sometimes wavered. Was she too much? Bongiovi glimpsed it in her too—a doubt about herself.
“You don’t know why I love you!” he told her.
“I was like, ‘Why do you love me?’” says Brown. “And then he listed all these things that I hated about myself. I was like, ‘You see good in those things?’ And he was like, ‘Of course I do.’
“Those are things that I love about myself now,” she says. “He was a really big, huge part of me loving myself and becoming a woman. It was like, ‘Wow, I really love this person because he allows me to love myself.’”
There’s a hint of that kind of revelation in Brown’s new book. Nineteen Steps, a collaboration between Brown and the novelist Kathleen McGurl, follows protagonist Nellie, who exhausts herself trying to protect her family during the harrowing late days of World War II. Nellie falls for an American Air Force pilot and, ecstatic with love, wishes the world could “feel the intense joy she felt right then. It was so marvellous, it was the cure for all problems.”
The experience of falling in love with Bongiovi and the intensity of their connection was “bizarre,” says Brown. “He’s so kind. And his heart is just loving and wonderful and smart.” It doesn’t hurt that he’s “tall and blonde,” with “dashing eyes.” Brown sounds infatuated, somewhere between a 19-year-old in 2023 and a 1940s starlet. But she is certain about forever. She never fantasised about a wedding. “That wasn’t my dream,” she says. “My dream was to have a baby.”
She has always known she wants children. “I wanted to be the woman that my mom is to me and I wanted to be the woman that my grandmother was to me,” she says. “So that was never my, like, intention, to be a wife. But after meeting Jake and seeing, ‘Oh, I don't have to be this stereotypical wife for him. He doesn’t want me to be that either. He wants me to go and do my thing and live my life, and he will hold my hand in the process of that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I do want this.’”
Brown’s idea of doing her thing isn’t so much staying late at a weekday happy hour as it is flexing her particular powers, her skill at making things happen.
“I just think there are things in the world that haven’t been created,” she says, explaining why she doesn’t take up yachting or, perhaps more fittingly given her interests, retreat to a donkey sanctuary, between acting roles. She wants to make things: stories that celebrate female strength, products that serve people’s needs.
“I don’t need to do a whole big thing and change the world,” she says. “I don’t need that. But if I can do the small things that help people—their heart, their mind, their spirit—then that’s what I’ll do.” And the things she does: not so small. Brown first addressed the United Nations at age 14 and became the youngest person to ever be appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. In that role Brown works to expand access to menstrual care and education for girls around the world. She points to the need for access to products as simple as Advil and tampons. These things should be a right, not a privilege, she explains.
She credits her feminist awakening to a visit to a psychic, who informed her that she was, in fact, a feminist. Brown went home and googled “How do I know if I’m a feminist?” After reading articles and books, she “really grasped the idea of feminism and what it means to me,” she says. “Ultimately it’s about opportunity.” Her production company aims to tell stories about what girls and women can be. A slate of forthcoming PCMA films on the horizon includes Damsel, in which she will play a dragon-fighting princess alongside Angela Bassett and Robin Wright (“The theme is feminism,” she says, thrilled). She’s looking forward to opportunities to cast other women—to give chances to performers who might otherwise be overlooked.
Soon Brown will say goodbye to Stranger Things, the TV show that launched her stardom. She likens this upcoming change to graduating from high school. “When you’re ready, you’re like, ‘All right, let’s do this. Let’s tackle this last senior year. Let’s get out of here,’” she says. “Stranger Things takes up a lot of time to film and it’s preventing me from creating stories that I’m passionate about. So I’m ready to say, ‘Thank you, and goodbye.’” She’s prepared for what’s next, she adds, precisely because the show has given her “the tools and the resources to be a better actor.” But she is unwilling to be goaded into mourning the show. No one is dying, she points out, bluntly. “When it ends, I’m going to be able to still see these people.”
She’ll also star opposite Chris Pratt in The Electric State, a postapocalyptic adventure movie from the Russo Brothers.
“To be able to go toe-to-toe with Chris Pratt!” she marvels. “It’s a very exciting opportunity that I never thought I’d be able to have, to be able to be treated the same as him and to be looked at and respected the same as him on the set by the production, by the studio.”
Pratt, for his part, was taken by Brown. “In a way it’s hard to believe she’s so young,” he tells Glamour. “There’s a rawness to her performances. She’s present, capable, talented, and her process is like shooting from the hip—it takes real confidence. The people who can do it are especially electric.”
Brown is equally effusive about Pratt. “He’s such a great man, but also a great actor and a great costar. And you rarely get that in this business, to work with men that really support you and understand you and let you shine.”
Have her past male costars treated her with that same level of respect? Brown pauses for the length of a heartbeat.
“Some of them absolutely have, yes.”
At 19, Brown has survived the gantlet of being a child actress. Staring down the final months of her teenhood, she says, she’s thinking about the trajectory of actors she loves: Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, and Jodie Foster—all child actors who went on to have careers that built on and eclipsed their early successes.
She still deals with self-doubt. Having every one of her choices—her hair, her clothing, her makeup, her fiancé—questioned is not helpful. As for getting engaged at 19, she knows what people are thinking. But she knows herself too. She might have teenage insecurities, but she also has instincts that have steered her through a phenomenally successful career. She trusts herself. If there’s one thing she has faith in, it’s her own sense of timing. “It’s like—I know I should make this movie now. I know I should write this book now. I know I should do this now,” she says.
“It’s not because I can’t do it in 10 years; of course I can do it in 10 years,” she says. “But why, when I know that it’s going to work now? Just like Florence will be there in 10 years. You’ll be able to see my movie in 10 years on TV. And I know that Jake and I will be okay.”
She says she learned to seize the moment from her own family, who drove across the country to let her pursue an acting career. “It’s like, why wait? Let’s go for it.”
Both she and Bongiovi, Brown points out, have parents who married young and are still in love decades later. (Yes, his dad is Jon Bon Jovi.) “We were modelled wonderful, loving relationships,” says Brown. “So it’s something that we both had that mutual drive for.” They’re close with both sets of parents (the two had been having lunch with hers just before this interview). “His family were so wonderfully accepting of me and embraced me, and it’s so nice to find a second family in that,” says Brown.
Repeatedly during our interview I ask Brown to clarify: Where does she get the energy? The 12-hour shooting days, the long production meetings, new Florence launches, the book, UNICEF, the endless cycle of orphaned pets in need of homes, the global domination—doesn’t she get tired? She looks confused.
“Of course, anyone gets tired, but I take a nap!” she says. “And then I wake up, and then I keep going.”
Photographed by AB+DM
Stylist: Ryan Young
Hair: Nasetia Windham
Makeup: Blake Johnson
Manicure: Kim Cao
Set Design: Sinclair E. Reddings
Production: Sienna Brown
