Millie Bobby Brown Plans to Conquer Broadway Despite Being Partly Deaf

It’s been just more than a year since Millie Bobby Brown, aka Eleven on Stranger Things,, unleashed her real supernatural power on the world: the ability to rap Nicki Minaj’s legendary verse on “Monster” while simultaneously silly stringing her young co-stars and Jimmy Fallon. And it turns out, Brown has bigger musical aspirations, as she revealed in a new interview with Variety. Basically, she wants to be in a musical. Matilda, specifically.

“I like her wittiness. She’s funny and also just extremely smart, all at the same time,” Brown said. Apparently, her Stranger Things co-stars Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin, who appeared in Broadway productions Les Misérables and The Lion King, respectively, warned her of the grueling rehearsal schedule; Brown reported she was unfazed, possibly even excited by the prospect. “That’s why I would like to,” she explained. “I think Broadway’s such a tough kind of routine.”

Still, Brown never received any formal voice training, just as she never took formal acting classes (which doesn’t seem to have been an impediment at all). She was also born with partial deafness in one ear, which gradually became complete deafness. When she sings now, she can only hear herself halfway. But she has not let that set her back either: “If I sound bad, I don’t care, because I’m just doing what I love,” she told Variety in a separate story. “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,” she encouraged.

As she said in an interview with W earlier this year, she aspired to be a singer from an early age—since she was three, five years before she even began auditioning for acting roles—and got her start “just humming.” (She didn’t hesitate to admit, “I was really bad.”) Early obsessions with High School Musical, Rihanna, and Amy Winehouse were all pretty formative; more recently, her tastes (especially as far as karaoke jams go) tend towards Bruno Mars. “‘Just the Way You Are’ or ‘Versace on the Floor,’ there’s so many good ones now, and especially with his new album,” she said. (Just search Youtube for Brown singing the Dreamgirls cut “And I Am Telling You” for evidence her Broadway aspirations might not be too far off.)

However, until Stranger Things, Brown didn’t know what a record player was—after all, she was born in 2004. Of course, she revealed this on a recent Good Morning America appearance, for which she wore head-to-toe Gucci in red, white, blue, and black, including a pair of whimsical, nautical-inspired heels that gave the 13-year-old an extra couple of inches and earned her comparisons to a young Judy Garland. So, will it be Matilda, or The Wizard of Oz?