A lot has changed in the seven years since Millie Bobby Brown first played Enola Holmes, the swashbuckling little sister of Sherlock, his equal in both sleuthing and pontificating. For one thing, Brown is no longer the child star telekinetic of Stranger Things; she is 22 now – a mother, a wife, and a producer, in addition to her continued work as one of the world’s most recognisable actors. So, if she were to give her 15-year-old self a piece of advice? “Oh, there’s so much!” Brown exclaims, taking a beat before landing on one very simple directive: “Don’t go online. Just don’t do it.”
Luckily, the internet and online trolls are not things her Victorian-era protagonist has to deal with; Enola’s bag is more murder and good ol’ fashioned skulduggery. Out on Netflix now, Enola Holmes 3 finds the brainy and brilliant Enola preparing to marry her foppish longtime beau Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) in a seaside ceremony in Malta. The wedding bells fall silent, however, when the bride-to-be discovers her brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) has been kidnapped. Gasp!
It goes without saying that Brown sees a lot of herself in Enola, an intrepid young woman on the precipice of adulthood, managing a gazillion expectations and the onus of a famous last name. “She and I have given a lot to each other,” Brown says. “I definitely think that growing up with a character really helps elevate it in a different way. It feels like multiple perspectives of me at different ages.” Like Enola, Brown is also newly (relatively speaking) married; she lives with her husband Jake Bongiovi in rural Georgia with their baby daughter and a menagerie of rescues, including a great dane named Barbie, a geriatric dachshund named Rigby, and a goat named after the “WAP” rapper Cardi B.
But growing up is not always sunshine and weddings and farm animals. Whether you’re an amateur detective in the 19th century or an internationally known movie star today, coming of age is hard and confusing. It can get dark; any teenager will tell you that. All this to say that Philip Barantini – behind such heavy-hitting dramas as Adolescence and Boiling Point – is not as shocking a choice to direct Enola Holmes 3 as you might initially think. That said, Barantini, who took over from Harry Bradbeer, the director of the first two instalments, was still stunned to receive the call.
“I assumed it was going to be for something dark like Dune 3… but then they said Enola Holmes 3, and I thought, OK, well that’s interesting,” recalls Barantini. “I read the script and realised that what Jack [Thorne, the writer] had done made it a whole lot darker, a lot more grown up.” The change makes sense, Barantini notes: “Millie is a grown woman now. And so I thought, well, if I can bring a bit of my own flavour to the franchise, I’d love to give it a shot.”
The third film ups the ante on all fronts. Romantically, too. Partridge – a rumoured front runner for the coveted James Bond tux – does exude a certain 007-ish quality. “Oooh… well, I did have to hold a gun for the first time,” he laughs. “And I wore a three-piece suit. I was feeling pretty good, myself. The thought did cross my mind, but let’s see.” Next to him, Brown gives nothing away, only raising her eyebrows and grinning.
Millie’s grown up and matured in the industry; she has a better understanding of it than actors who are three, four times her age
Sharon Duncan-Brewster
Unlike Bond, Enola Holmes 3 is still very much a family affair. Any action between our grown-up, loved-up protagonists remains pretty chaste – a peck here, a held gaze there – but there is one scene that is, dare I say, the most romantic of all. It involves hair. Before a late-night dip in the sea, Tewkesbury braids Enola’s tresses into a single plait that falls against her back. “Yes, thank you!” beams Brown when I bring it up. “That was my idea; I wrote that into the script. We had this big scene and we were like, is it going to be a kiss that’s going to make the audience swoon? What is it?”
The idea actually came from Brown’s marriage. “My husband, at night, he braids my hair, and I think it is the most adorable, loving thing,” she says. “I’m obsessed with the fact that he does that for me. And so I thought, that’s what I want to do.” Partridge laughs, recalling how Brown had to teach him to braid in all of two minutes.
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The two share an easy intimacy, ribbing one another gently in that familiar tone typically reserved for siblings. Oddly enough, it made the romantic scenes that much easier to film. “I don’t think we could ever be awkward,” says Partridge. “It’s been awesome growing up together because it’s like anything goes, in this fun, creative way. I’m not afraid to make a complete fool of myself, so that gives us licence to mess around.” Brown agrees wholeheartedly. “Sometimes we’ll be just about to kiss and the director will ask us to hold there and stare at each other for two minutes. Those are the moments that I think, if it were a stranger, I would want to die. But with Lou, it’s easy.”
More adult than the romantic elements is the movie’s handling of serious subjects like Britain’s colonial history, which finds itself under Enola’s magnifying glass thanks to the film’s Maltese setting; the island was under British rule from 1800 until 1964. Exploring social issues is not unique to this third entry in the franchise: the first film looked at vote reform; the second at workers’ rights and female-led trade unions.
It’s one of many things that drew Himesh Patel – of Yesterday and The Odyssey fame – to his role as Dr Watson, loyal sidekick and forbearing flatmate to Cavill’s Sherlock. “The films are trying to say something about the modern world through the lens of historical issues, and I think that’s something to be admired,” says Patel.
To that end, the franchise villain Moriarty – unmasked in a dramatic reveal at the end of the second film – is depicted in a sort of sympathetic light. Moriarty’s evil is not without reason. The hypocrisy of the British empire for one thing, and her treatment as a Black woman for another. “That’s what I love about Moriarty: she’s always come with a mission to call out what isn’t fair,” says Sharon Duncan-Brewster, the actor who plays her. “There’s no secret as to the colonial history of Great Britain, and I get to approach elements of conversations that a lot of people are scared to have.
“I’m not an angry Black woman, but stuff needs to be said and we need to talk about it. If you’re talking about reparations and that sort of thing, I’m all for it. There needs to be an acknowledgement of sorts.”
Speaking with the cast and crew of Enola Holmes about what it’s like to work with Brown, the thing that keeps coming up is her age. More specifically, how easily it slips one’s mind. “I do often forget how young she is, just because she’s got a sort of maturity beyond her years,” says Patel, who praises her devotion as a producer.
Brown planned dinner and a games night at her house before filming started, to help speed along the on-set camaraderie. Duncan-Brewster, meanwhile, recalls meeting her for the first time: “I was in admiration of this young being who was just manoeuvring around this busy world, making all of these decisions. But she’s grown up and matured in the industry; she has a better understanding of it than actors who are three, four times her age.”
It’s worth remembering, Barantini says, that the films were all her idea. It was Brown who initially pitched the film to Netflix after reading the books as a teenager, sensing there was an important story to be told here, a vital character to bring to life on screen. The film is as much her baby as it is her sibling.
Her confidence on camera, and behind it, has come with experience; this is the third Holmes film Brown has produced (she also served as an executive producer on the fantasy film Damsel, and is a producer on at least two more Netflix films due for release). “Delegation is key,” she says. “I try to be in it because obviously I’m the lead, so I want to be able to immerse myself in the character and not have to worry about everything behind the screen. But sometimes it gets tricky. I definitely lean on others.” Not all the way, though. According to her co-stars, Brown was hands-on in her producer role. “She’s hyper-focused and vocal,” says Brewster-Duncan. “She means business!”
This universal, and frankly heartwarming, praise for Brown follows years of the actor being underestimated by the public and her peers. It’s another thing that she and Enola – not only a girl but a young girl, and the lesser-known sister to a more famous brother – have in common. “I’ve worked with a lot of boys and men who don’t feel that they’ve been underestimated… shocker,” Brown says, with an audible eyeroll. “I feel, coming from my perspective as a female child actor, there was a lot of pressure and a lot of scrutiny of the way I looked. I constantly felt underestimated by everyone. And for so long I was trying to prove everyone wrong, but I’ve come to the realisation, after having my daughter, that I don’t actually care.”
She smiles as though she is vocalising this feeling for the first time.
“I cared for a really long time, but I don’t any more! And I don’t underestimate myself any more, and that’s really the most important lesson I’ve learnt. As a girl, that’s the reason I felt so passionate about Enola Holmes, because I want girls to see her on screen, and feel with her, and be her. In many ways, I did this for my daughter.”
‘Enola Holmes 3’ is streaming on Netflix
