'Stranger Things 2' star Millie Bobby Brown on her signature stare and faking a bloody nose on cue
— -- It takes a special skill to get blood to drip from your nose on cue for the cameras. You’ll need to tilt your head just right, wait patiently until you feel it start to flow and if all works as planned, voila, there you have it. “Stranger Things 2” star Millie Bobby Brown has faking a bloody nose almost down to a science. She talked to ABC News about how the secret lies with a tiny tube.
“They stick it up in my nose and I have to hold it back,“ Brown said while demonstrating how she tilts her head just so. From there, the show’s directors wait for Brown's signal that it’s time for action. That's because she can feel the sensation as the concoction flows from the tube.
"I'm like, 'OK action,'" Brown said of her cue to the directors that it's a good time to roll. "Or sometimes I'll feel it coming and then nothing comes. And the director is like, 'Why didn't it go?' And I'm like, 'I felt it. I swear,'" joked Brown. The bleeding nostril and her mesmerizing stare have become two signature traits of her character, Eleven, on the hit series, so much so that when fans of the show come across Brown, they ask her to show off the stare.
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“After season 1 I had done a lot of Comic Cons meeting fans,” Brown, 13, said in an appearance on “Popcorn With Peter Travers.” “And fans would say, ‘Hey Millie can you do the stare?’ So I would do the stare. And then coming back to season 2 and doing the stare, I was like, ‘This is so weird. I'm not doing it for a fan anymore. This is actually Eleven. I have to actually try.’ It's so weird to come back to my stare like, 'Whoa, it's not a fan coming to me. This is actually on camera.'”
Brown has garnered a host of fans and nearly a million Twitter followers since the original series debuted in 2016. Travers asked Brown how she feels her life has changed in just the last year.
“It's definitely transformed. My schedule is a lot busier,” said Brown. “I'm meeting new and different people every day. I think it's really exciting. I feel like Eleven's really helped me as a person and as an actor. So I think yeah, she's kind of made me develop into a new person. I'm so thankful for 'Stranger Things.' It's something I could never regret because it's definitely transformed my career.”
Be sure to watch the full interview with Peter Travers and Millie Bobby Brown in the video above.
