Millie Bobby Brown rose to fame in the Netflix series Stranger Things, but as the actress celebrates her 22nd birthday, fans are only just realising Eleven wasn’t her first role
Millie Bobby Brown’s life changed forever when she landed the part of Eleven in the Netflix series Stranger Things. But as the acting mega-star celebrates her 22nd birthday today (19th February), some fans are just realising they had actually seen her somewhere else before she ever set foot in Hawkins, Indiana.
The first series of Stranger Things was released a decade ago in 2016, when Millie Bobby Brown was just 12 years old. The series made superstars out of her and the other young cast, but despite not even being in her teens when she landed the now iconic role, it wasn’t actually her first foray onto the silver screen.
In fact, Millie’s acting career actually began three years earlier in 2013 when she was just nine years old. Her first-ever on-screen role was in the ABC fantasy drama series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, which was a spin-off of Once Upon a Time, where she played a young version of the main character Alice for two episodes.
After that, she went on to have a main role as Madison O’Donnell in the BBC America series Intruders, before taking on guest roles in shows like NCIS, Modern Family, and Grey’s Anatomy.
Then, three years after her acting debut, she landed the role of Eleven in the Netflix supernatural horror series, which she would star in for almost a decade until the show wrapped in late 2025.
A Reddit post shared on the Alice in Wonderland forum in 2025 shared screenshots of Millie playing young Alice in her acting debut, and commenters said they had no idea they’d actually known who Millie was before watching Stranger Things.
One person said: “I watched that show and didn’t recognise that it was her! She looks so young!”
Another added: “I started [the show] yesterday and was like, ‘Is that Eleven?’. Then she spoke, and yep, 100 per cent.”
While Millie’s acting career might have already been up and running before she got the role as Eleven, she very nearly gave up on her Hollywood dreams before landing the part that catapulted her into stardom.
In a 2022 interview, Millie revealed that a “disastrous audition” she endured when she was just 10 years old almost put her off acting for good. The “powerful casting director” brought her to tears when they told her she “wasn’t going to make it in the industry”, and their words nearly made her find a new career path.
But her parents encouraged her to try her luck with one last audition before closing the curtain on her acting career – and that audition just happened to be for Stranger Things.
She said, “My parents told me, ‘Just do this one last audition on tape, and then you can go outside and play with your friends again.’ So I said, ‘Okay, yeah, I should do this one because it looks cool.'”
The rest was history as Millie was successful in landing the role of Eleven, which catapulted her into stardom. Now, 10 years on from the first season of Stranger Things, Millie’s career shows no signs of slowing down.
She’s set to appear in Enola Holmes 3 later this year as the titular younger sister of the iconic Sherlock Holmes, and is lined up to star in and executive produce the upcoming Netflix series, Prism.
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