Millie Bobby Brown

Born in Marbella in 2004 and raised British, Millie Bobby Brown spent her first years on screen doing what child actors do: young Alice in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, a small part on the supernatural thriller Intruders. She was twelve when Stranger Things arrived in 2016 and turned her into one of the most recognisable performers on television, with two Primetime Emmy nominations and a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award to show for it.

What made Eleven work is that the part gave her almost nothing to say. For a full season she is a face and a posture, holding scenes against adults with a handful of words, and Brown plays her without any of the cuteness a child actor is normally rewarded for. She can do the opposite too. Enola Holmes turns straight to camera and chats to the audience, and the comic timing there is genuinely good, which is not a skill that usually travels with the intense-stare skill.

The career since has been unusually deliberate. She has produced her own vehicles from Enola Holmes onward, and Netflix has built film after film around her: two Godzilla pictures, Damsel, The Electric State. That is real power at an age when most actors are still auditioning, and the honest verdict is that the vehicles are less interesting than she is. They are engineered to fit a star rather than to test an actor.

She was on the Time 100 list in 2018, at fourteen, and appointed the youngest UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador ever named. Stranger Things ended in 2025, with a third Enola Holmes following. The interesting question now is what she does in something nobody built around her.