Millie Bobby Brown: The Girl Who Was Always Too Much of What She Is

"It's really hard to be hated on when you don't know who you are yet."

At ten years old, a casting director told Millie Bobby Brown she was too mature to make it as a child actress.

The verdict left her in tears. Her parents had sold their house in Bournemouth, moved the family to Los Angeles, and burned through their savings on headshots and audition tape fees. They were near bankruptcy. They'd lived in one room. They'd lived with her manager. And now a stranger in a casting office was telling them it was over.

Her parents said: do one last audition, then you can go outside and play.

The Duffer Brothers handed her a box of clothes and said, "Try to imagine you don't know what clothes are." She had no idea she was auditioning for Eleven. The next day they called: "Millie, would you like to be our Eleven?"

She fell on the floor.

Thirteen years later, in March 2025, the Daily Mail ran a headline: "Why Are Gen Zers Like Millie Bobby Brown Ageing So Badly?"

At ten, she was too old in spirit. At twenty-one, too old in appearance. The verdict is always the same: Millie Bobby Brown is too much of what she naturally is. Too mature. Too warm. Too loud. Too giving. And the story of her life is the story of what happens when a person wired to love the world keeps learning that the world will punish her for it.

TL;DR: Why Millie Bobby Brown is an Enneagram Type 2

• The debt she never owed: Her family went broke pursuing her career. She became the breadwinner at twelve. The obligation was never spoken, but it shaped everything.
• The giving that won't stop: UNICEF ambassador at 14, beauty brand at 15, adoption at 21, veterinary school enrollment, 62 rescued animals on a Georgia farm.
• The silencing: Called a brat at 13 for being too enthusiastic. Driven off the internet at 14. Publicly humiliated by an ex at 16. Body-shamed at 21.
• The question she couldn't answer: She never knew whether people wanted Millie — or just what Millie could do for them.

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"She'd Belt Out a Tune"

While her siblings watched cartoons, Millie watched musicals — Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Annie, Bugsy Malone. Her father Robert noticed early: "She'd belt out a tune. She was performing from day one."

Born in Marbella, Spain. Raised in Bournemouth, England. Third of four children. Born with partial hearing loss in one ear that would progressively worsen to total deafness despite medical interventions. She now wears a hearing aid.

At eight, the family moved to Orlando. At a weekend acting workshop, a talent scout pulled her parents aside and said she had "instincts you cannot teach." The family packed up again. Los Angeles. The gamble.

Small guest spots followed — Grey's Anatomy, Modern Family, NCIS. Not enough. The money evaporated. At one point they were living with her manager. "My parents sacrificed everything," Millie told Variety. "At one point we were all living in one room."

Then the "too mature" rejection. She nearly quit.

"I always knew that I was mature and I couldn't really help that," she said later. "Being told that I wouldn't make it in this industry — it was so hurtful."

The family moved back to England. Defeated.

One last audition.

Eleven required someone with more emotional weight than her years — a girl who had been experimented on, isolated, weaponized, and never allowed to simply be a kid. The Duffer Brothers were looking for the exact quality that had disqualified Millie everywhere else.

The thing that almost ended her career is the thing that made it.

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"I Don't Want to Ever Talk Again"

On the Stranger Things set, twelve-year-old Millie did something her adult co-stars didn't expect. She took care of them.

Noah Schnapp: "She was always checking if everyone had eaten, if everyone was comfortable. Even as a kid herself."

She would sneak off set and hide behind chairs to watch Winona Ryder perform. "I would go off set and then pretend I was called back on set and then hide behind the chairs and watch her scenes. It was amazing just to be around her."

Off camera, she and Ryder had their own ritual. "I would just go to her like, 'Ugh, the boys are getting on my nerves today!' And she'd be like, 'Got it — come sit.' And we'd eat cheese."

The warmth was instinctive. Unstoppable. And the industry punished her for it.

During press tours, Millie was exuberant — chatty, animated, beaming. She was thirteen. The response from the adults around her was not warmth in return.

"They called me an idiot, stupid, a brat," she told Glamour in 2023. "They said I was trying to steal the thunder of my co-stars. It's hard to hear that at 13."

The effect was immediate. "I was just penalized for overtalking and oversharing and being too loud." And then, quietly: "I don't want to ever talk again."

A girl who had been performing from day one — belting out show tunes, hiding behind chairs just to be closer to people she admired — learned that being herself was dangerous.

At 14, she was driven off Twitter entirely by a fabricated meme campaign. Days later, at the MTV Movie & TV Awards, she gave a speech through tears: "If you don't have anything nice to say, just don't say it."

She was fourteen.

"When I was 10 and in the industry, I was very confident and didn't care about what people would say," she said. "But since turning 15, I started having panic attacks and really bad anxiety."

She adopted a therapy dog named Winnie. The panic attacks were that bad.

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What is Millie Bobby Brown's personality type?

Millie Bobby Brown is an Enneagram Type 2

Most people see a young celebrity who grew up too fast — married at twenty, mother at twenty-one, owner of sixty-two rescue animals and a beauty empire. If you understand Type 2, the real driver comes into focus: a child who became her family's salvation and absorbed the lesson that love must be earned through giving.

The Brown family sold everything and went broke pursuing Millie's career. She was aware of this by age ten. When Stranger Things hit, she became — at twelve — the primary reason her family's gamble paid off. She didn't choose this role. But she internalized it.

Type 2 sits in the heart triad of the Enneagram, where the core emotion is shame — the belief that who you are, stripped of what you do for others, is not enough. Listen to Millie describe her own inner life:

"Who am I meant to be? Who do they need me to be for them?"

"I always struggled with self-identity and knowing who I was. I always felt like I didn't quite belong in every room."

"I enjoyed playing characters that people could relate to because I felt like no one could relate to Millie."

That last line is the wound in three dimensions. She didn't just love acting. She needed it. Characters gave her permission to exist — because characters are useful, characters serve a purpose, characters are loved for what they provide. Millie, without a role to play, wasn't sure anyone would want her.

The evidence runs through her entire life like a thread pulled from both ends:

• UNICEF's youngest-ever Goodwill Ambassador at 14
• Florence by Mills at 15 — a beauty brand designed to help young girls feel good about their skin
• 62 rescue animals on a Georgia farm with personal veterinary training from Purdue University
• Adopted a child at 21 — and immediately built a wall of privacy around her daughter that she never had for herself
• Enrolled in veterinary courses to learn wound care and blood pressure monitoring for animals she personally tends

This is not a scattered list of celebrity side projects. This is a single pattern repeating at every scale: I am useful, therefore I am loved.

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"I Felt So Out of Control"

The world kept taking from Millie Bobby Brown. And for years, she kept letting it — because that is what people who believe love must be earned do when the people around them cross lines.

At fourteen, she mentioned on the Emmys red carpet that thirty-one-year-old Drake texted her regularly, saying "I miss you so much" and offering advice "about boys." The public recoiled. Millie defended him on Instagram: "Why you gotta make a lovely friendship ur headline? U guys are weird... for real."

She couldn't see the power imbalance. She could only see a connection being taken away from her.

At sixteen, her ex-boyfriend Hunter Ecimovic — a twenty-year-old TikTok personality — went on Instagram Live while drunk and made graphic claims about their sexual relationship. He said he'd lived in her family's house for eight months.

"When you get publicly humiliated this way, I felt so out of control and powerless," she told Allure in 2022. "Walking away and knowing that I'm worth everything and this person didn't take anything from me, it felt very empowering."

She described the relationship as "unhealthy" and processed it while filming Stranger Things. Quietly. On set. Performing. The one thing she knew how to do.

"I started in this industry when I was 10 years old," she wrote on Instagram in 2025. "I grew up in front of the world, and for some reason, people can't seem to grow with me. Instead, they act like I'm supposed to stay frozen in time."

On turning eighteen and the shift in how the press treated her body: "I believe that shouldn't change anything, but it's gross and it's true."

The sexualization didn't begin at eighteen. It had been building since she was twelve. Eighteen just gave it permission.

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"Why Do You Love Me?"

She met Jake Bongiovi — son of Jon Bon Jovi — in 2021. They announced their engagement in April 2023 and married in May 2024. Small ceremony. Family only.

Jon Bon Jovi's assessment: "They're sorta mature beyond their years."

What Jake did for Millie cannot be overstated.

"When I met Jake I just felt I could be loud," she told Glamour. "He embraced that and encouraged that and I fell in love with myself while being with him."

The girl who had been silenced for being too much found someone who wanted all of it.

Then this:

"I asked him, 'Why do you love me?' 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."

That single sentence is the most psychologically revealing thing anyone has said about Millie Bobby Brown. A person who has spent her entire life earning love through usefulness married someone whose entire contribution is: I don't need anything from you.

She changed her legal name to Millie Bonnie Bongiovi. Dropped both "Bobby" and "Brown." Told Noah Schnapp on camera: "Drop the Bobby, drop the Brown." She wasn't keeping any of it.

"I am so different from him," she said. "I don't see the best in everyone. I'm always like, 'What are your intentions?' because I've been jaded by the industry. Now I'm able to really see... I'm allowing myself to be less reserved in that world."

They moved to a farm in Georgia. Away from Hollywood. Away from cameras. She doesn't have social media on her phone — someone else handles her accounts. She calls her father-in-law Jon Bon Jovi for advice: "His wisdom is ridiculous."

Her co-star Henry Cavill, who played her brother in the Enola Holmes films, modeled something else she needed. "I'm not allowed to ask about his personal life," she said. She described this as feeling "like a real adult relationship. Like a really healthy one."

For someone burned by men with no boundaries — Drake at fourteen, Ecimovic at sixteen — the appeal of a man who says here are the lines makes perfect sense.

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"Get Off My F---ing Case"

In March 2025, during the Electric State press tour, the Daily Mail ran its headlines. Comedian Matt Lucas compared her to his Vicky Pollard character.

She was twenty-one years old.

"I was depressed for three, four days," she told British Vogue. "I was crying every day." She cried backstage at the BRIT Awards while getting her hair done.

Then something shifted.

She posted an Instagram video calling out the writers by name. "The fact that adult writers are spending their time dissecting my face, my body, my choices — it's disturbing. This isn't journalism. This is bullying."

"I refuse to apologize for growing up. I refuse to make myself smaller to fit the unrealistic expectations of people who can't handle seeing a girl become a woman. I will not be shamed for how I look, how I dress, or how I present myself."

And in British Vogue, without the polish of a prepared statement: "If me being blonde or wearing more make-up really bothers you, I'm going to address it — not just for myself, but for every other girl who wants to try a new hairstyle or wear a red lip. It's, like, get off my f---ing case, you know?"

Matt Lucas apologized. Sarah Jessica Parker said she was "enormously proud." Celebrities rallied.

But notice the structure of what happened. She didn't just defend herself. She defended "every other girl." Even in her most combative moment, the impulse was to make it about protecting someone else. Not for power. For everyone who needs someone to go first.

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"My Home Is Full of Love for Anyone or Anything"

The farm has sixty-two animals. Her goats are named Cardi B, Slick Rick, and Eminem. A baby goat born in June 2025 she named Florence June — after her great-grandmother Florence, the same woman who inspired the name of her beauty brand, Florence by Mills.

She enrolled at Purdue University. Not for acting. For veterinary science. She learned to treat wounds, take blood pressure, manage medical records, and monitor animal health. She bought her own ultrasound machine and personally confirmed that her donkey Betsy was pregnant.

This is not celebrity pet ownership. This is someone who has systematized the impulse to care.

"I'm not doing it for the aesthetic," she said. "I'm doing it because I love it."

In August 2025, she and Jake announced they had adopted a baby girl. The Instagram post included only a photo of a willow tree. No face. No name.

"For me, it's really important to protect her and her story until she's old enough to potentially one day share it herself," she said. "It's not my place to purposefully put her in the spotlight unwillingly."

"Since I was a baby, I told my mom, like, 'Baby dolls.' I wanted to be a mom just like the way my mom was to me."

"For me, I don't see having your own child as really any different as adopting. My home is full of love for anyone or anything."

Noah Schnapp is the godfather. Their friendship — which began on the Stranger Things set in 2015 when they were both children — has become family in the literal sense.

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Nanny Ruth's Stories

When Millie was a child, she would crawl into her grandmother Ruth's bed at night. "Nanny, can you tickle my arm and tell me the stories about your childhood?"

Ruth would recount surviving the 1943 Bethnal Green tube station disaster — a crush that killed 173 civilians, one of the worst home-front tragedies of the Second World War. Ruth lived. She carried the story for decades. And she passed it to her granddaughter through touch and whisper, in the dark, one arm-tickle at a time.

Ruth died of Alzheimer's in 2020. Millie wrote publicly that she "never healed" from the loss.

Then she wrote a novel. Nineteen Steps preserves Ruth's survival story for one more generation.

The beauty brand is named Florence by Mills — after the same great-grandmother. The baby goat is named Florence June. Everything connects. Every name is a thread pulled taut between the people she has loved and the people she will love.

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At ten, they said she was too mature. At thirteen, they said she was too loud. At fourteen, they drove her off the internet. At sixteen, an ex-boyfriend claimed her body on a livestream. At twenty-one, they said she aged too fast.

And at twenty-one, she adopted a baby girl whose name she won't share, whose face she won't show, and whose story she says is not hers to tell.

The girl who gave everything finally found something she would not give away.

Disclaimer This analysis of Millie Bobby Brown's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect the actual personality type of Millie Bobby Brown.