Millie Bobby Brown returns as Sherlock Holmes' younger sister in Enola Holmes 2, which arrives globally on Netflix on Friday, November 4.
The first Enola Holmes movie was a huge hit for streamer Netflix in 2020, so it's no surprise to see Sherlock's sleuthing sibling return – and she's now set up her own detective agency.
The game finds it feet again!
Who stars in Enola Holmes 2?
As well as Millie Bobby Brown as the titular heroine, the Enola Holmes sequel also stars Superman actor Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, David Thewlis as Superintendent Grail, Louis Partridge as Tewkesbury, Susan Wokoma as Edith, Adeel Akhtar as Inspector Lestrade, and Helena Bonham Carter as Enola's mother, Eudoria Holmes.
The first Enola Holmes movie included scenes filmed at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, which doubled for Basilwether House, home of the Dowager Lady Basilwether (Frances de la Tour), the grandmother of the runaway Viscount Tewkesbury.
That movie's final battle scene was played out in Hatfield House's Armoury.
What is the plot of Enola Holmes 2?
Fresh off the triumph of solving her first case, Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown)
follows in the footsteps of her famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), and opens
her own agency – only to find that life as a female detective-for-hire isn’t as easy
as it seems.
Resigned to accepting the cold realities of adulthood, she is about to close shop when a penniless matchstick girl offers Enola her first official job: to find her missing sister.
But this case proves to be far more puzzling than expected, as Enola is thrown into a dangerous new world – from London’s sinister factories and colorful music halls, to the highest echelons of society and 221B Baker Street itself.
As the sparks of a deadly conspiracy ignite, Enola must call upon the help of friends – and Sherlock himself – to unravel her mystery.
Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown especially loves the way audiences are thrown immediately into the action as the second film begins, without any preamble required.
“We’ve really upped the ante from the first film,” she says. “The first film was about self-exploration, personal growth: a young girl loses her mother, goes to find her mother, has very misogynistic brothers, one of whom, Sherlock, is a work in progress.
“She’s on this journey of self-exploration with a silly boy (Tewkesbury) that helps her along the way.
“I loved that approach to the first film. It really gave everyone a peer-eyed view into Enola. But this film isn’t about Enola. It’s about Detective Enola Holmes.”
The game, it seems, has found its feet again!
Who is Enola Holmes?
In September 2020, viewers were introduced to an all-new heroine – one whose story took place during an era of explosive social change and whose defiance of
long-accepted norms touched a nerve among audiences brimming with a similar
need for good trouble.
That hero was Enola Holmes, a plucky 16-year-old who set out to find her missing mother, only to find herself at the centre of a case that changed the world – and became a supersleuth on par with her famous older brother in the process.
While Enola wasn’t initially part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, her arrival in Nancy Springer’s 2006 young adult book series, and later on screens around the world, marked a turning point for the beloved Sherlock Holmes canon.
With Enola Holmes came the opportunity to introduce the detective genre to a new generation of armchair sleuths and meld historical fact and fiction.
And to give the world’s greatest detective a run for his money by making his little sister just as equally bright and possibly more resourceful and tenacious then he could ever be.
The follow-up marks the return of Emmy Award-winning director Harry Bradbeer and five-time BAFTA-winning screenwriter Jack Thorne, who collaborated on a story that would reflect the harsh realities that young women living independently in the city had to face as they tried to make her way in Victorian-era London.
“We wanted this to be more of a grown up film, with a grittier, more dangerous
story,” says Bradbeer.
“We wanted to tell a story that brought Enola into contact with people outside her background and class by introducing her to working girls of her own age.
“That was something I was very excited about. And so that’s where the match factory idea came in.”
Thorne proposed the idea of drawing inspiration from the Match Stick Girls’ Strike of 1888 to the fore. In addition to providing a historical context for the film, it presented an opportunity to show a natural evolution for Enola.
If the first film was about surviving on her own, the second is about Enola discovering that she’s hardly the first young woman to do so, and that the girls are stronger together than they are alone.
“The joy of working on Enola Holmes is working out how to weave her into the canon of Sherlock, and the social history of the United Kingdom,” says Thorne.
“With the first we were able to talk about the extension of the vote, with this Harry and I were so excited to dig into the Match Strike. A moment when the Suffragettes, still in their infancy as they are in the first film, helped the incredible women who demanded better pay and safer conditions in the factories of Bryant & May.
“It was one of the first events in workers finding solidarity to demand better conditions, and it was led by women.
“To weave and celebrate Sarah Chapman and others through this film is such a privilege, and we hope will start a real historical celebration of their greatness.”
5 Filming locations of Enola Holmes 2
Here's some of the filming locations of Netflix's Enola Holmes sequel.
1. Wapping
The film’s matchstick factory was built in an old printing factory in Wapping,
England, a stone’s throw from the original Bryant & May factory.
Not only did it have to look as close as possible to the original, it also had to be a working factory with moving parts.
Production designer Michael Carlin found actual pieces from the Bryant & May factory.
All of the actors working in the factory scenes had to learn how to faithfully recreate the process of building and packing the matches.
“It was important that all the matchstick girls knew what they were doing to the point where it came naturally to them,” Carlin explains.
“It’s quite a process. In the 19th century, the matchsticks had to be manually dipped in four different chemicals – one of which was unfortunately the phosphorus that was poisoning them."
2. Chatham
The factory walkout was filmed at the historic dockyard at Chatham.
The redbrick warehouse has been used in numerous films including, in a happy
coincidence, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. That 2009 blockbuster was also partly shot on location at Hatfield House.
3. Shepperton Studios
The Paragon Music Hall took 12 weeks to build at Shepperton Studios.
Millie Bobby Brown did not read the scripted scenes for the music hall and asked that she not do any rehearsals so that she could come to the place, as Enola does, completely fresh and without preconceptions.
“It was brilliant,” she recalls. “We did a full Steadicam on Enola’s face as she enters the Paragon and walks among all these different characters that Harry had handpicked to be there — and I didn’t know what any of them were going to look like or what they were going to say to me.
“The look of amazement on my face was real because those people were so whacky and original and colourful.”
4. Halton House
The ballroom scene was filmed at Halton House, in Buckinghamshire.
Appropriately, the stately home was built by Alfred de Rothschild, son of Baron Lionel de Rothschild, of the Rothschild international banking dynasty, in the 1880s and was used for entertainment and social parties.
Halton House was built in the style of a French chateau.
5. Hull, East Yorkshire
While Enola Holmes 2 is set in Victorian London, scenes were filmed on the streets of in Hull.
The Old Town was transformed into Victorian London, with Millie Bobby Brown as Enola Holmes seen chased down the High Street and along an alleyway.
What was the Match Girls' Strike?
The Match Girls’ Strike of 1888 was one of Britain’s most significant events in the evolution of workers’ rights and women’s empowerment.
A historic David and Goliath moment that pitted the women and teenage girls working against the powerful and influential manufacturing company Bryant & May, the strike began after the firing of a worker who refused to sign a statement that management had concocted to refute reports about the abusive working conditions in their factory.
Her dismissal was the catalyst for a walkout of 1,400 women and girls over issues including petty fines, excessive hours, and dangerous working conditions, the most dangerous of which was the composition of the match heads themselves: a compound of white phosphorus, which was poisonous to the workers.
The ensuing negative publicity would eventually lead to the defeat of Bryant &
May. More significantly, the actions taken by the women and girls would lead to the ban of white phosphorus in the manufacture of matches not only in the UK, but throughout the Western world via the Berne Convention of 1906.
While the British labour movement was still in its formative stages in 1888, the
following year saw The Great Dock Strike, after which tens of thousands of
workers began forming unions to advance the cause of workers’ rights.
Enola Holmes 2 is released in the United Kingdom on Netflix on November 4, 2022 at 7am GMT.
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