Millie Bobby Brown's Tragic Health Diagnosis, Explained

If we only look at Millie Bobby Brown's acting credits, we'd assume her career has been totally smooth-sailing. Since scoring her first role at the age nine in 2013, she's appeared in at least one project a year. And after getting her big break when she starred as Eleven in "Stranger Things" Season 1, her projects only continued to get bigger. At just 14, she made Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people and became the youngest-ever UNICEF goodwill ambassador. However, what some may not know about Brown is that her path to stardom was riddled with obstacles and potholes that made the journey challenging. Bullying, financial struggles, and being sexualized at a young age were just some of the tragedies the Florence by Mills founder faced as a child star. Brown even nearly quit acting after seemingly endless rejections from productions left her severely disheartened. And on top of all these, she also dealt with a tragic health diagnosis: complete hearing loss in one ear.

In 2017, Brown, then 13, revealed in an interview with Variety that she was discovered to be partially deaf upon birth. Her condition worsened as the years went by until she ultimately lost all hearing in one of her ears. But Brown didn't view this as a death sentence to her dreams of becoming an actor and singer. Instead, it helped her master these skills in an unexpected way. "I just started to sing, and if I sound bad I don't care, because I'm just doing what I love," she told the magazine. "You don't have to be good at singing. You don't have to be good at dancing or acting. If you like to do it, if you genuinely enjoy doing it, then do it. No one should stop you."

Millie Bobby Brown's inability to fully hear her own voice saying lines or singing lyrics hasn't prevented her from absolutely crushing both acting and singing. "Stranger Things" co-creator Matt Duffer couldn't praise the young actor enough while speaking to Variety in 2017, saying, "We have yet to give her something that she's unable to do. I can throw this girl an incredible fastball, she's going to hit it. It's like a singer who can hit any note. Her range is just absolutely incredible. I have yet to see any limits to it." However, while she has no issues when it comes to the acting part, Brown admitted there are some drawbacks to being a partially deaf actor that have been harder to avoid or overcome.

Eight years after revealing her diagnosis, Brown discussed the realities of being partially deaf when she sat down for an interview on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast in March 2025. Describing her condition to host Alex Cooper, the "Enola Holmes" star explained, "I'm just kind of bad enough where, like, things are just, like, very, very... muffled underwater to me." She went on to share that due to this, she frequently fails to catch certain words, such as cues on set and things her husband, Jake Bongiovi, tells her. "I miss a lot of things he says. He calls it selective hearing. I disagree. ... But I miss, like, 'action' and 'cut.' Like, I do miss very important things in my life, like, 'cause I can't hear. ... Yeah, I was born with it, and... they kind of gave up. They said, 'She's broken,'" Brown joked.