Millie Bobby Brown is now a household name, thanks to the runaway success of Stranger Things, but as she tells the September issue of Allure, getting the role of Eleven nearly didn’t happen.
The actress’s dreams of stardom could have been dashed by what the magazine calls a “disastrous” audition for a powerful casting executive who said, at 10 years old, Mille was “too mature” to make it in Hollywood.
Millie explained why she was drawn to acting. “I enjoyed being different people because I always struggled with self-identity and knowing who I was. Even as a young person, I always felt like I didn’t quite belong in every room I was in.”
So, that critique from the casting director stung, she admits.
“I always knew that I was mature and I couldn’t really help that,” she tells the magazine, noting that as a child she felt “like no one was quite like me in school and no one was as mature as I was.”
“And then being told that it wasn’t, that I wouldn’t make it in this industry, it was so hurtful,” she says.
“[It] was really hard because I thought [maturity] was a good thing.”
Then, she recalled, “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, ‘OK, yeah, I should do this one because it looks cool.'”
The audition was for the Duffer Brothers, who created Stranger Things, and the rest, as they say, is history.
After the show became a hit, Millie recalled thinking, “‘Gosh … I could really change the world with this.'”
To that end, she’s launched a production company and a skin care line for people her age.
The issue hits newsstands August 16.
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