Eleven goes through a lot in the season’s last.
For Entertainment Weekly, Millie Bobby Brown, among many other things, explained how she recorded the scene where she read the letter left for her by Hopper. Turns out, her process was pretty method.
“They had prerecorded David [Harbour] and they played it out loud,” she said. “I didn’t want to read that speech. I didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t want to rehearse it. I just immediately wanted to put a camera on me and find the way I react and the way I reacted was pure devastation and sadness, and a distraught child that just lost her father or so she thinks.
So it was definitely a raw emotion, especially because David Harbour and I are really close. He is just one of the greatest men. I think something I admire about David is he respects girls and women so much. It felt so… I’m so gutted and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is horrible.’ So the emotions were raw in that scene for sure.”
That’s intense, and it plays well on screen: Brown’s emotions feel authentic because they are. She explains that the scene where she prepares to leave Hawkins with the Byers’ was played in a similar way.
“It was as emotional as it looked. We all said, ‘Let’s just imagine that this [sic] the end of filming forever.’ And we all started immediately crying as soon as they said, action. It felt really genuine and it was like saying goodbye to best friends.”
Fortunately, there’s little doubt that this is not, in fact, the end of filming forever, and it’ll be exciting to see where these characters, and Brown’s fantastic performances, go next.