‘Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown Finally Confirms She Knows Eleven’s Fate

After an excruciatingly long wait, Netflix finally delivered the fifth and final season of one of its biggest series ever, Stranger Things, across three release dates from Nov. to Dec. 2025. This series delivered one of the more controversial endings in recent memory, eliciting comparisons to other major hit TV shows like HBO’s Game of Thrones in May 2019 and, much more recently, Prime Video’s The Boys in May 2026. This new season ended with an epic final battle against Jamie Campbell Bower’s Vecna, but big questions still linger over what exactly happened to the show’s biggest character — Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven.

Season 5’s final battle pitted Eleven, Will (Noah Schnapp), and Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) against Vecna, as they go into his mind to try to stop him from merging Earth with the Upside Down. The rest of the Hawkins crew simultaneously works to take down the Mind Flayer in the Abyss as that showdown ensues. This confrontation ends in dramatic fashion, as Eleven stays behind in the crumbling Upside Down and shares her love for Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) to prevent the military from capturing her and to successfully trigger the explosives placed to destroy the dimension. While her fate beyond this moment is unknown, Brown has thoughts on what went down.

Joining a live showing of the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz (per Variety) Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown shared her feelings about Eleven’s mysterious end in the show. Brown revealed that the show’s producers told her not to tell anybody after making her fate “a secret kind of pledge, not wanting to let anybody except her and two other people know what happened:

“They were like, ‘Do not tell anyone. Because we made it a secret kind of pledge. No one else knows. It’s just us three. And what we do with that information, it’ll be up to them.”

Brown and her husband, Jake Bongiovi, saw reactions to this moment flood the internet and got a laugh about how split they were, even noting that the show’s entire cast thinks Eleven is dead. Joking about that reaction, she also spoke about trying to give them hope that Eleven may have lived to see another day:

“Jake was like, ‘Ooh, these are really split.’ And the whole cast thinks I’m dead. One, rude. It’s so rude of them. There’s something to it surely. You guys are projecting!. It’s like, ‘Hey guys, we get it. You want me dead!’ But I was like, ‘Believe!’ Let’s have some hope in here.”

While Eleven’s fate has been one of the hottest topics amidst the Stranger Things fandom since the finale aired ahead of the new year, Brown seems intent on keeping the mystery behind her character’s survival or death in place. It is still unclear if this information will ever be revealed, but with Stranger Things continuing into new stories after the original show’s ending, Eleven will continue to be an intriguing and seminal figure in this show’s legacy.

All five seasons of Stranger Things are now streaming in full on Netflix.