What was Millie Bobby Brown’s first movie as an actor?
For an actor who’s been heralded as one of the fastest-rising young stars in Hollywood for several years now, Millie Bobby Brown hasn’t appeared in a huge number of theatrically released movies.
In fact, she’s only been in two, which has done absolutely nothing to prevent her from climbing the industry ladder. The unstoppable rise of streaming has completely shifted the paradigm of what stardom is and how it can be achieved and maintained, with Brown one of the shining examples of its evolution.
She’s only 20 years old and has a smattering of credits in her filmography, yet she’s one of the jewels in Netflix’s crown and one of its most valuable in-house commodities. Could she open a movie at the box office based on her name alone? Probably not, but place her front and centre in one of the streaming service’s original projects, and it’s guaranteed to draw in a massive audience.
For further proof, look no further than what she’s already accomplished. As one of the focal points of Stranger Things, the cultural juggernaut that’s arguably Netflix’s flagship original series, she became famous worldwide in an instant when the sci-fi/fantasy show became one of the most-watched and talked-about shows in years.
Since then, she’s produced and starred in the literary adaptation Enola Holmes and its sequel and pulled double duty as the lead and executive producer of the fantastical blockbuster Damsel. The common thread between them, other than Brow,n is that all of them were anointed as one of Netflix’s ten top-viewed original films of all time within 28 days of being released.
It’s inevitable that 2025’s The Electric State will follow suit, especially when it’s got Marvel Cinematic Universe veterans and The Gray Man directors Joe and Anthony Russo behind the camera with Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, and Colman Domingo among the ensemble, not to mention the in-development Enola Holmes 3, The Girls I’ve Been, The Thing About Jellyfish, and the adaptation of her debut novel Nineteen Steps, all of which are set up at Netflix.
As a result, the entire sum of Brown’s big screen credits extends to two blockbusters and one character: making her theatrical and feature debut as Madison Russell in the creature feature Godzilla: King of the Monsters, she reprised the role in its crossover sequel Godzilla vs Kong, which remain the only two movies she’s been in that weren’t Netflix exclusives.
So, what was her first acting role?
Stranger Things may have propelled Brown to household name status, but her first onscreen appearance came three years before Matt and Ross Duffer’s ode to 1980s genre fare premiered on Netflix when she played a young version of Alice in two 2013 episodes of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, the short-lived spinoff of Once Upon a Time that was cancelled after a single 13-episode season.
Her first leading role was as a main cast member on the supernatural BBC series Intruders, which also wasn’t long for this world after being canned following its initial eight-episode run. Single-episode stints on NCIS, Modern Family, and Grey’s Anatomy followed before she landed the role of Eleven in Stranger Things and never looked back.
Fast-forward less than a decade, and she’s directly competing with Adam Sandler and his Happy Madison production company to be named the single biggest guaranteed draw Netflix has at its disposal, an outcome few could have predicted when she was known for playing Eleven and little else.
The streamer is clearly confident in her abilities as both an actor and producer, though, after distributing four of the six movies she’s been in so far, and she’s been involved on the production side with three of those, with at least another four in the works behind the scenes.
