Millie Bobby Brown has a message for anyone upset by her fluctuating accent.
“I’m an actor I grew up in the public eye I grew up in America I come to set and I’m an actor and I adapt,” Brown, 20, told Max Balegde in a TikTok interview published on Friday, March 8. “I want to mimic people. I can’t help that when I’m around my fiancé [Jake Bongiovi] or when I’m around Jimmy Fallon, who [both] have a very American accent, I want to replicate it.”
Brown explained that how she speaks often depends on where she is geographically, noting that she’s currently sounding more British because she’s in England.
“I don’t do it intentionally and I’m sorry if it offends you,” she added. “But listen, I’m trying my best!”
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Balegde, who is British himself, also came to her defense, telling the camera, “She’s Millie Bobby Brown and she could speak how she wants.”
Brown first raised eyebrows earlier this week when she appeared on The Tonight Starring Jimmy Fallon to promote her Netflix film Damsel, where some fans felt her accent was wavering between American and English.
“Her british accent is barely there anymore. I know shes been in america for a long time now but omg it used to be SO strong,” one person wrote via TikTok under a clip of the show. Another added, “Millie go back to England now, until your accent comes back!”
Others, however, quickly defended the actress, arguing that her accent has likely shifted after being cast as American characters, like Stranger Things’ Eleven. “You guys do realize she also talks American is stranger things when she plays eleven!” one fan said. “Also she talks like that in interviews bc people complain they can’t understand her accent!!”
While on The Tonight Show, Brown was discussing her engagement to Bongiovi which they previously announced in April 2023. Telling the story of how he proposed, she shared how her fiancé used their mutual love of diving to craft the big moment.
“One day we were on vacation and he was like, ‘Mil, you’ve got to be up at 8:00 a.m. we’re going on a dive.’ And I was like, ‘8:00 a.m. dive?’” she recalled, sharing that they ended up going to their usual diving spot, and while “many meters down, he gives me a shell, and I turn it over and it’s a ring.”
After Brown said yes, however, disaster briefly struck. “He puts the ring on my hand and as I go to show him, the ring falls off my finger, plummets, so fast it was like a cinematic movie,” she quipped. “Jake threw himself so deep, he does a cinematic grab and he saved the ring. I truly feel it’s a reflection of who he is, and I feel like we’re always going to have each other’s back and if anyone drops the ball we got it.”
When they finally returned to the surface Bongiovi properly asked Brown to marry him by presenting her with her mom’s ring. “It was very magical,” she said.
Brown’s engagement to Bongiovi, 21, is likely also a contributing factor to her ever-shifting accent, as the pair have been inseparable since they began dating in 2021. While some critics have argued Brown and Bongiovi are too young to get married, Brown has candidly explained why she disagrees.
“We were modeled wonderful, loving relationships,” she explained to Glamour in October 2023. “So, it’s something that we both had that mutual drive for.”
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At the time, Brown noted that marriage wasn’t initially the end goal. “My dream was to have a baby,” she told the outlet. “I wanted to be the woman that my mom is to me and I wanted to be the woman that my grandmother was to me. So that was never my, like, intention, to be a wife.”
She added that upon meeting Jake, who is the son of legendary rocker Jon Bon Jovi, she had a change of heart. “He wants me to go and do my thing and live my life, and he will hold my hand in the process of that,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I do want this.’ … It’s like, why wait? Let’s go for it.”
