She was dialed up to Eleven.
Retro Netflix hit “Stranger Things” recently ended after five seasons and ten years, giving nearly every character a happy ending — except for Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown).
She got an ambiguous farewell where she sacrificed herself to save everyone else, making everyone believe she’s dead. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) said he believed she was alive, living a peaceful life by a waterfall. She was shown onscreen with long hair, by a nature scene with rolling hills and waterfalls, which may or may not be real, or a product of Mike’s wishful thinking.
“I wanted to still have it pretty gritty, but I wanted a romantic feel into it,” the show’s Emmy-nominated hair designer, Sarah Hindsgaul, told The Post.
In that final look of Eleven onscreen, her hair is longer than it’s ever been before, and flowing.
Hindsgaul said that it showed “what I have always hoped for Eleven – was that she was just going to be able to just be a girl. I wanted [her hair] to just be really pretty.”
Sadie Sink, who played Max, has said she thinks Eleven is dead.
When asked if she thinks the waterfall scene could have been real, Hindsgaul said, “I hope it is. I think everybody [in the cast] has different feelings. I think it’s a beautiful ending.”
The hit Netflix show first premiered in 2016, and ended on New Year’s Eve after nearly a decade.
The show followed Eleven, Will (Noah Schnapp), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery), Hopper (David Harbour) and more as they lived in Hawkins, Indiana, and dealt with threats from the sinister “Upside Down.”
In the end, Eleven saved the day, but her own fate was left up in the air. Everyone else went on to have nice lives, such as Steve becoming the local coach / sex ed teacher at the school, and Nancy becoming a newspaper reporter.
“I don’t think Eleven is necessarily very vain. I don’t think she really cares. I think she’s very utilitarian about her looks,” said Hindsgaul.
“So when we see her this year, I wanted it to not be about hair. I wanted to take the hair out of it as much as possible. I think when she’s practicing in the first couple of episodes, she’s quite human…..you can see that she has human flaws.”
Later in Season 5, when Eleven went into “battle mode,” her hair was flat to her skull.
“I wanted to bring her back as much as possible to Season 1. We needed to see that fragile girl again, somebody that can just stand kind of naked in front of us. There’s a strength in that that is just undeniable.”
Her utilitarian hairstyle also “gives us a beautiful way to make her feminine and to give everybody what they want to see [after that], when we see her by the waterfalls,” she explained.
Brown never had much commentary about her hair, Hindsgaul said.
“[She] has always kind of gone with it. She’s very brave like that, and is willing to not wear makeup and take her hair off,” she told The Post. “That shows how brave the actress is.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
