Netflix’s major hit Stranger Things premiered in 2016, and its star Millie Bobby Brown is about ready for the series to be over. In a new interview with Seventeen, the 19-year-old admitted she’d been living in Hawkins long enough.
“I’m definitely ready to wrap up. I feel like there’s a lot of the story that’s been told now,” she said. “It’s been in our lives for a very long time. But I’m very ready to say goodbye to this chapter of my life, and open new ones up.”
Brown added, “I’m able to create stories myself that are important to me and focus on the bigger picture. But I’m really grateful [for the show].”
Brown was only 12 when she debuted as Eleven, a girl with telekinetic powers who has escaped a government testing facility, an alternate dimension, and a number of monsters every season. The show has spanned her entire teenage life, and it’s no wonder Brown is excited to see who she is outside of Stranger Things, as a person and a performer.
Meanwhile, she has had other projects, including her two films on Netflix, Enola Holmes and the sequel Enola Holmes 2. She’s also set to star in two upcoming films: Damsel and Anthony and Joe Russo’s The Electric State.
In Enola Holmes, Brown plays the younger sister of detective Sherlock Holmes, played by Henry Cavill. She joked during an interview with Today that filming the two movies made her nervous about returning to the Stranger Things set. Her character Enola frequently breaks the fourth wall, and she worried it would become a habit.
“While filming, I had a dream that I was on the set of Stranger Things, and I couldn’t stop looking at the camera,” Brown said. “And now, I have this deep-rooted fear that now I will never stop looking at the camera. So now, I’m so obsessed with it.”
It took a while for Stranger Things to premiere their fourth season after COVID-19 delays stopped production, but season five is expected to begin shooting in June of 2023.
Creators Matt and Ross Duffer said in an interview with TVLine that the new season will probably include a time jump, because those original teens are young adults now.
“I’m sure we will do a time jump,” said Ross. “Ideally, we’d have shot [seasons 4 and 5] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that. So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up.”
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.