'Enola Holmes 2' director says that he almost had to cut one of Millie Bobby Brown's improvisations from the film for being too modern
- "Enola Holmes 2" director Harry Bradbeer told Insider about a line he almost cut from the film.
- Millie Bobby Brown improvised a line where she tells Sherlock she has a "crazy idea."
"Enola Holmes 2" director Harry Bradbeer told Insider that he almost had to cut one of Millie Bobby Brown's improvised lines in the film out of a fear that the language she used was too modern.
Brown stars as the titular character in "Enola Holmes 2," released Friday on Netflix. In addition to playing Enola in both this film and the first in the series, Brown has also served as a producer on both, and also improvised while working on the film.
One of those improvisations — from an exchange between Enola and Henry Cavill's Sherlock Holmes — almost didn't make it into the movie, Bradbeer said.
"In the scene with Sherlock when she said 'crazy idea, have you ever considered a flatmate?' That's improvisation," Bradbeer told Insider. "And it threw me at first because I thought, 'That's anachronistic.' No one would've said that at that time."
Bradbeer said that he looked into when the term "crazy" originated, he realized that it had come into use prior to the film's Victorian-era setting and could exist in the film, even if he thought that it "looked almost like Millie." There were other instances, however, where he thought that Brown had been "a little too contemporary in her manner," and brought it up with her.
Brown has spoken in the past about being "very similar" to Enola, saying in the film's official press notes that Bradbeer sometimes had to approach her after takes and ask whether she had just given a performance as "Millie or Enola."
Ultimately, however, Bradbeer told Insider that he found Brown's instincts invaluable while working on the film, saying that many of her ideas — such as Enola leaning backward on a chaise to peer at Sherlock's paper-strewn floor — were in line with the character.
"That was almost too Millie, but I thought, 'No, if I was Enola, I would do that,'" Bradbeer said. "That's always the question."