Millie Bobby Brown is back on Netflix to kick some monster butt, but no it’s not for Stranger Things Season 5 – she’s currently filming the final season with her cast. Brown’s latest movie is a fantasy action flick called Damsel, which has her going head-to-head with a fire-breathing dragon after being dropped in the depths of its lair. When CinemaBlend spoke to the star about playing the role, she recalled how starring alongside Godzilla years ago helped her prepare for this project on the 2024 movie schedule.
Before Damsel, Millie Bobby Brown faced many monsters between dealing with Vecna in Stranger Things and being part of two Godzilla movies. Here’s what she told us when our own Sean O’Connell asked her how those monster movies prepared her for Damsel:
You have to leave your humility at the door. Like, there’s really not much [to go off of]. You gotta be super vulnerable and super willing to look stupid. Otherwise, it’s just not going to work. It’s not going to sell and I definitely had to do that on this and I think that’s probably what Godzilla taught me. Like, I was 12 years old. Of course, at that time we’re like, ‘I don’t want to be embarrassed,’ and I just was like, ‘I got to kind of pretend that there is a giant lizard in front of me.’ The camera’s my friend, the crew members are my friend and I gotta do what I got to do, and this is my job.
While we as an audience get to be immersed in seeing Millie Bobby Brown acting opposite massive creatures once her roles are finished, it looks a lot different when she is actually on set making the movie magic happen. But as Brown shared, over the years she has learned the secret is simply allowing herself to “look stupid” and “embarrassed” to get the scenes done where she has to pretend something definitely not there is in front of her.
As Brown also pointed out during the interview, she was part of the Godzilla movies, starting with 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, when she was around 12 years old. (The movie was shot in 2017). Considering Millie Bobby Brown recently turned 20 years old and she is an engaged woman, that was a really long time ago for her… even if it feels like just yesterday for us. Brown learning this lesson when she was quite young must have really prepared her to lead Damsel, where she has to play off of a dragon that was not really there.
Damsel is about the daughter of a lord, Elodie (Brown), who receives an exciting proposal to marry a prince (Nick Robinson) and excitedly accepts. However, during the wedding festivities, Elodie is thrown down into a dragon’s lair by her new family in order to feed the creature’s needs to keep peace in their kingdom. Under these dire circumstances, Elodie has to try her best to save herself from the dragon.
You can check out CinemaBlend’s full Damsel interviews with Millie Bobby Brown, Robin Wright and director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. To see the actress and that dragon in action, Damsel is now streaming for those with a Netflix subscription.