Mila Kunis is best known for That '70s Show, a steady film career, and her marriage to
Ashton Kutcher.
But there's a lot more to her than all that.
Here's the story of her stunning transformation.
Kunis was born on August 14, 1983 in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
She was the second child of Mark and Elvira Kunis.
The family was Jewish, which made it difficult living there at the time.
As Kunis explained to The Sun in 2012,
"My whole family was in the Holocaust.
My grandparents passed and not many survived.
After the Holocaust, in Russia you were not allowed to be religious.
So my parents raised me to know I was Jewish.
You know who you are inside."
Kunis' parents both had good jobs.
Mark was a mechanical engineer, and Elvira worked as a physics teacher.
But the two decided to move to America to make a new life when Mila was seven years
old.
That road to a better life was a long and hard one, as the family had just $250 when
they touched down in Los Angeles in 1991.
"My parents took it upon themselves to lie to me and tell me we were moving up the street."
While the Kunises had middle-class jobs in Ukraine, they struggled to make ends meet
in their new home, with Mark doing odd jobs, and Elvria working in a drugstore.
Mila also had trouble assimilating into American culture.
She told the Los Angeles Times in 2008,
"I blocked out second grade completely.
I have no recollection of it.
I always talk to my mom and my grandma about it.
It was because I cried every day.
I didn't understand the culture.
I didn't understand the people.
I didn't understand the language."
After having time to adjust to life in America, Kunis turned into a more outgoing child, and
by the age of 9, she asked her parents about taking acting classes.
She ended up meeting the woman who would become her manager in her very first class.
She then landed commercials with big brands, such as Barbie and Lisa Frank, which she described
in 2018 in a video for Marie Claire:
"All I had to do was go 'Wow!'
Okay.
That's literally all I did for like the first two years of my career."
Kunis' parents were supportive of their daughter's budding career, just so long as she stayed
in school and got good grades.
She must've been working diligently, because she soon started racking up credits and setting
herself up for steady work.
She told Interview Magazine in 2012,
"From 9 to 14 I probably did 20 commercials.
The first movie I ever did was Piranha [...] Then I did a movie called Make a Wish, Molly, where
I played a Mexican girl who was racist against a Russian Jew, but I didn't get the Russian
Jew part because they didn't think I looked Russian or Jewish enough — and, mind you,
I am both Russian and Jewish — so I was cast as the racist Mexican.
Then I did a movie called Gia, which was the film that Angelina Jolie did for HBO.
I did Baywatch, The John Larroquette Show.
Any show on television I guest-starred on.
I was that little kid."
Young Mila Kunis gained national attention when she starred in the sitcom That '70s Show,
which premiered on Fox on August 23, 1998.
When she went to the audition, she originally wanted to be on a different show called Sunset
Beach, because it had cute guys in it.
Thankfully, her manager steered her towards That '70s Show instead.
Kunis famously lied to the producers about her age in order to be cast on the show.
In a 2001 interview with People Magazine, she admitted,
"I told them I was going to be 18.
But I didn't tell them when I was going to be 18!"
Soon enough, Kunis fully transformed into the annoyingly confident, self-obsessed Jackie
Burkhart.
Even though she didn't know English when she moved to America at the age of seven, she
spoke the language so well at this point that she would even talk way too fast for some
people.
As her co-star Laura Prepon told People,
"Sometimes you can't understand what she's saying — we're always telling her to slow
down."
One of Kunis' That '70s Show co-stars was, of course, her now-husband, Ashton Kutcher.
When they were on the show, though, there wasn't anything romantic between them.
That's probably a good thing, as it likely would've been inappropriate if there had been.
Kutcher was 19 when filming started, while Kunis was only 14.
Their first kiss was captured on camera for a That '70s Show episode, which might sound
like a romantic moment, but Kutcher for one doesn't remember it that way.
On a 2017 episode of The Howard Stern Show, he admitted,
"It was really weird.
I was like, 'Isn't this illegal?'
It was really awkward.
She was 14!
She was like my little sister."
"Do you know who would look totally, totally sexy, glammed up like Bowie?"
"Who?"
"You, Michael!"
Kunis seems to share the sentiment, telling Insider in 2018,
"I thought he was fine, he was a nice guy, we worked together and sometimes he'd drop
me off at home."
Kutcher, however, teased on the Stern Show that he thinks Kunis had a crush on him by
revealing,
"She has a journal, like a diary of when she was a kid that she wrote ... she thought I
was cute.
At first I think she thought that I was good looking.
Shortly thereafter, I was just annoying to her because I was like a big brother."
"That moment where you hear or see movies where like your heart skips a beat and it
happened with Ashton, and I was like, 'Huh!
Stop it!'
Like I was like, 'No.'"
Like many TV actors, Kunis had her eye on making the jump to the big screen.
Unfortunately, her first attempts weren't met with a great response from audiences or
critics.
In 2002, she starred in the straight-to-DVD film American Psycho II: All American Girl.
That film wasn't even originally meant to be a sequel to the Christian Bale-starring
cult classic original.
Instead, it was supposed to be something different that was somehow re-edited into a follow-up
to American Psycho.
Other films with names like Moving McAllister and Boot Camp didn't play in theaters for
very long or went straight to DVD.
Things finally started to look up when Kunis was cast in the Judd Apatow -produced Forgetting
Sarah Marshall, which came out in 2008.
She had originally tried out for a part in another Apatow film, Knocked Up.
Apatow remembered her when she didn't land that role and that led to the part in Sarah
Marshall.
She told The Orlando Sentinel in 2009,
"I do think that Sarah Marshall changed things for me, and for the better.
It let people see me in a different light and made it easier, in the future, for me
to prove myself.
I’m not just Jackie any more!"
Before Kunis reunited with Ashton Kutcher, she was in a long-term relationship with Macaulay
Culkin, another actor who first gained fame as a child star.
The two started dating in 2002, but in 2011, it was announced that they had split.
While they were still together in 2007, Kunis told Parade,
"We're incredibly private, and I think we relish the privacy we do actually have and
are able to sustain it.
We enjoy each other's company.
We like to read books or play video games or watch TV or go to the movies.
And he's an amazing cook.
He makes dinner every night."
Kunis' rep proclaimed that the split was "amicable" when it happened, but, in 2018, the actress
told a somewhat different story.
When she appeared on Dax Shepard's podcast Armchair Podcast, she admitted,
"I f-----d up.
I was an ass in my 20s and I'll be the first to admit it.
And that's something that took me a long time to come out and be like, 'Yeah, you know what,
I was a d--k,' and accept it and I own it now."
Kunis continued to feel the positive effects of Forgetting Sarah Marshall years after that
film came out, as her performance caught the notice of some significant people, particularly
director Darren Aronofsky.
That notice, along with a little recommendation from her friend Natalie Portman, led to Kunis
being cast in Aronofsky's psychological horror flick Black Swan.
Kunis ended up dislocating her shoulder and tearing her calf ligament while training to
be a ballerina in the film, but she managed to power through the pain.
She told The Independent in 2011,
"An opportunity like this very rarely comes about.
So if you complain, you kind of feel like a baby, so you choose not to."
Kunis would go on to be nominated for a Golden Globe and win a Saturn Award for best supporting
actress for Black Swan.
In 2012, she told The Independent that she'd been getting recognized on the street more
and more since the film's release.
As she put it,
"I feel that I have to be more aware of the attention and at least try to live up to a
certain image.
It's weird but also flattering."
Even with all the attention that comes with being a celebrity, Kunis isn't afraid to share
her political opinion.
In 2012, for example, she told Esquire,
"The way that Republicans attack women is so offensive to me.
And the way they talk about religion is offensive.
I may not be a practicing Jew, but why we gotta talk about Jesus all the time?"
For people who don't like to hear celebrities talking about politics, her response is,
"I don't think I'm a celebrity.
I'm a working actress.
I think there's a difference."
In 2016, Kunis voiced criticism of the treatment of Syrian refugees in an interview with Glamour.
It's an issue that hits close to home for her, as she and her family are all religious
refugees.
As she put it,
"I'm not going to blow this country up.
I'm clearly paying taxes.
I'm not taking anything away.
So the fact that people look at what's happening and are like, 'Pfft, they're going to blow
shit up'?
It saddens me how much fear we've instilled in ourselves."
When Kunis and Ashton Kutcher started dating, it was with the expectation that they were
both never going to get married.
Hilariously enough, at the time that they began hooking up, Kutcher had just starred
in the movie No Strings Attached and Kunis had starred in Friends With Benefits, both
movies about, well, friends with benefits.
As Kunis explained during a 2016 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, the
two of them basically ended up reliving their movies in real life.
“Like, we literally shook hands, we're like, 'We're going to have fun because we're both
single and young.'
Three months later we're living together.
Six months later, we're like married and have a kid."
When Kunis and Kutcher finally did end up getting married, they kept things casual with
the wedding, holding the ceremony in a secluded area at The Secret Garden at Parrish Ranch
in Oak Glen, California.
During an appearance on Conan, Kunis declared that Kutcher got her a beautiful and stunning
engagement ring, but for their wedding bands, she decided to just get them from Etsy.
Kunis and Kutcher have a daughter named Wyatt, who was born in October 2014.
Then in November 2016, Wyatt became a big sister to her brother Dimitri.
And even though they have mega-famous parents, these kids aren't going to be spoiled.
During an appearance on The Kyle and Jackie O Show, an Australian radio program, Kunis
said,
"The one topic of conversation we had even prior to ever having kids was always, 'How
do you raise a child to not be an asshole?'
It's so important because we both came from pretty solid poverty backgrounds and grew
up poor and are very much self-made and are very aware of what a dollar is worth.
Nothing's been handed to us."
Kunis has continued to be vocal about her struggles as a working mother and her choices
about parenting.
She talked with Vanity Fair in 2016 about nursing her daughter in public and the glares
she would get from people.
As she put it,
"It took us a little back because people actually looked at us in a shameful [way], and we were
like, ‘Oh my God' [...] It didn’t matter to me what other people thought.
That’s what I chose to do, but I think it’s unfortunate that people are so hard on women
who choose to do it and do it in public."
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