Despite being an ubiquitous presence in film and television for more than two decades,
how much do fans really know about Mila Kunis? From the lie that helped her land
her first major role to her high profile relationships, here's the truth about Mila.
Mila Kunis was born in Ukraine, while the country was still part of the now-defunct Soviet Union.
As she told The Sun, her family was Jewish and faced persecution, saying of her homeland -
"This is a country that doesn't want you."
She told Yahoo! that, as a result, she and her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was just 7.
"I was 7, and I was like 'what are all these boxes doing here?'
And my Mom's like 'Oh we're going to move up the street', and I was like..."
Detailing the initial culture shock she said -
"It was strange at first. I cried a lot when I first came over here."
However, she quickly acclimated to her new home in California,
where her parents emphasized the importance of hard work and weren't exactly thrilled
with her ambitions to get into the unstable world of acting, saying -
"When you're immigrants, and you have to work hard for everything just to survive,
it's only natural that you worry about having a stable job and income.
But I think now they're more or less convinced that I'm doing pretty well
and they don't have to worry about my career prospects anymore."
Prior to landing her life-changing role on "That '70s Show," Mila Kunis appeared in
all manner of TV commercials, along with numerous guest spots on various series.
Recalling that period of her childhood in a discussion with Interview,
she estimated that, between the ages of nine and 14, she acted in around 20 commercials.
Those commercials led to acting roles in bigger projects,
including the 1995 TV movie "Make a Wish, Molly." In that movie, Kunis told Interview -
"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."
Other child-acting credits included
the TV movie "Piranha," which she recalled for Interview, saying -
"It was Soleil Moon Frye, William Katt played my dad, and there were evil fish
everywhere. I was, like, 10 years old when I did that."
Another childhood role was playing the young version of doomed model
Gia Carangi in the HBO biopic "Gia," starring Angelina Jolie as the grown-up
version. Speaking about that role with Esquire, Kunis admitted that
neither she nor her parents were prepared for how racy the movie would be, saying -
"They were like, 'What did we put you in?!' They were as dumbfounded as I was."
Everything changed for Mila Kunis when she was cast as Jackie in "That '70s Show,"
debuting in the fall of 1998. During an appearance on "The Tonight Show,"
then-host Jay Leno asked how old she was when she landed the role and she explained
that she fibbed and said she was older than her actual age, which was 14, explaining -
"I told them I was gonna be 18... it's not technically a lie,
given all things went right, I was gonna be 18."
By the time the powers that be discovered they'd
been hoodwinked by a precocious 14-year-old, it was too late.
Given that it's customary in Hollywood for teenagers to be played by older actors who look
young, she explained that her deception eventually wound up working in her favor,
saying on "Lopez Tonight" -
"I was the age I was playing, so I think that's unheard of. People were like,
'You're so young!' I'm like, 'No, I'm actually the age I'm supposed to be.'"
Hidden away amidst all of Mila Kunis' film and television credits
is the music video for "Jaded," the 2001 single from Boston rock legends Aerosmith.
Frontman Steven Tyler, described the video's vibe in a making-of video for MTV, saying -
"It's like 1920s Moulin Rouge meets the year 2050,"
Kunis gushed to the New York Post of her experience working on the "Jaded" video, saying -
"Oh my god, that was the best thing. It was a huge honor to work with them. What's so rad about it
was that Steven Tyler actually introduced himself to me. And it was so cool because
he's so down-to-earth. There's not one person on this planet who doesn't know who he is."
One of Mila Kunis' most distinctive features is her eyes.
"Also you have really big eyes, and that freaks me out sometimes."
"Thank you, that's enough."
A closer look, in fact, will reveal that one eye's color differs slightly from the other.
This is not a random fluke of nature, however,
but the result of a chronic medical issue she has experienced throughout life.
As Kunis told Cosmopolitan, she had struggled for many years with iritis,
a condition that causes the iris to become inflamed, saying -
"I was blind in one eye for many years, and nobody knew."
After years of keeping her partial blindness a complete secret,
she had surgery to remedy the condition. The procedure returned her vision to the
afflicted eye, while maintaining its differing color, explaining -
"I'm not blind anymore. I had surgery a couple of months ago.
They cut it open and dropped a new lens in there."
There's no denying that fans of Mila Kunis would assume she's cooler than cool. Kunis, however,
is the first to admit that's far from true. Talking to Parade about her nerdiness she said -
"Listen, I am such a nerd. [...] My brain mentality is the same as a 12-year-old little boy.
The video games that I play, the things that I like to watch — I'm a Trekkie."
Kunis expanded on her nerdy nature in an interview with Esquire, saying -
"I read 'The Huffington Post', 'The Drudge Report'. I spend hours researching products.
I'm a product whore. Like soaps and creams. And just crap. I love Yelp."
And you better believe she takes her video gaming seriously. During an appearance on
"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" the actor revealed that a particular favorite had been "World of Warcraft."
However, as she explained, she wound up going so far down the rabbit hole
that she forced herself to go cold turkey, realizing she'd become addicted, saying -
"Let's just say that I had to quit the game for good,
going on a year now. It's such a good game, I love it!"
One factor that proved to be a distraction while playing "World of Warcraft" was her
incredibly recognizable voice, which she used during gameplay. She said -
"I said something once and they recognized my voice. That was the end of that."
Mila Kunis' longest-running role is one for which she's never had to show her face:
voicing Meg Griffin in the popular animated
Fox comedy "Family Guy," since season two. In an interview with Collider, Kunis said of the show -
"I hope it never ends. I'm so grateful for this job."
"I do get - the one thing that I get the most of is 'Shut up,
Meg' on the street. Like, people - All the time. All the time."
In fact, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic she'd continued to record her parts for the show,
albeit in a different manner than she had in the past, saying -
"I've been recording it through all of quarantine from my closet.
I have [...] a makeshift little tiny studio...".
She began working on "Family Guy," she told Collider,
when she was 15. Speaking with IGN, "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane
said that Kunis' youth initially helped her to land the role, saying -
"Mila, really, you were listening to a teenager. She had a very natural
quality to Meg that really made what we did with that character kind of really work."
Long before her relationship with Ashton Kutcher,
Mila Kunis was in a long-term romance with another famous actor:
"Home Alone" star Macaulay Culkin. In a 2007 interview with Parade, Kunis confirmed that she
and Culkin had been together for six years at that point. She gushed about her then-beau, saying -
"probably the most brilliant person I've ever met. He's so,
so smart and so aware and so kind and so sweet."
Her relationship with Culkin ended a couple of years later, and Kunis admitted she's
not proud of the way it concluded. Appearing on Dax Shepard's "Armchair Expert" podcast,
she confirmed their split was quote, "horrible," and that she was to blame, confessing -
"I f**ked up. I was an a** 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."
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher had a convoluted road to the altar.
Meeting as co-stars on "That '70s Show," they weren't romantically involved while
they starred in the show. In fact, they were both in separate, high-profile relationships:
Kunis with Macaulay Culkin, and Kutcher married to (and eventually divorced from) Demi Moore.
“We’re a couple.”
“A couple of something, yeah? I guess you could say that.”
Both were single when they reconnected in 2012, with a source at the time telling People that they
were, quote, "just friends." When Kunis finally told her mother that she was dating Kutcher,
her mom was incredulous. Chatting with Dax Shepard,
she recalled her mom's reaction when she broke the news.
"I was like, 'You've got to brace yourself for this one. I'm dating Ashton Kutcher.'
And she literally was like, 'Shut the f**k up' in Russian. I was like,
'No, I'm serious. I also may be in love with him, so...'".
As Kunis admitted, her future husband's reputation as a Lothario
didn't exactly give her mom the warm fuzzies, admitting -
"There were so many thoughts that she couldn't process. There's so many versions of his life
that people thought he was that he wasn't."
Ashton Kutcher has been known to be on the cutting edge of Silicon Valley tech;
he famously transformed a $30-million fund he'd set up into a $250-million fortune
by becoming an early investor in such ideas as Airbnb and Uber. Had he heeded
his wife Mila Kunis' opinion about the latter, however, he'd be significantly less wealthy.
As she told Stephen Colbert during a virtual appearance on "The Late Show,"
she said that Kutcher uses Kunis as a sounding board for potential investments, saying -
"He's really smart about including me in everything
and making sure that I'm aware of everything that is happening. He's always really smart
at knowing that sometimes you shouldn't listen to your wife."
That was definitely true when Kutcher pitched her the concept behind Uber,
describing it to her as, quote, "kind of like a cab company but anyone can drive the cab."
Kunis told her husband that Uber was, quote, "the worst idea ever...
you are going to put me in a car with a stranger? What is wrong with you?"
Mila Kunis and husband Ashton Kutcher haven't acted together much,
but the couple made a rare exception to appear in a TV commercial for Cheetos
that aired during the 2021 Super Bowl. In the commercial, which features singer Shaggy and his
2000 hit "It Wasn't Me," Kutcher continually catches Kunis as she munches on his Cheetos.
In an interview with "Today" Kunis explained why they don't team up more often, saying -
"We don't work together mostly because of the kids. There's a bunch of jokey answers
that we give people, but at the end of the day we don't want to be away from the kids
together at the same time for the duration of a shoot, which is about 14-, 15-hour days."
As Kunis revealed in an interview with People, early in their relationship,
Kutcher told her he'd purchased a ticket to be on the very first Virgin Galactic
commercial space flight, something she felt at the time would be, quote "fun."
A few years later, after they'd become parents to two children,
she had a change of heart and told him as a father it was reckless to
do something that could potentially put his life at risk. She recalled saying to him -
"The thing's going to explode and you're going to
die — and you're going to leave me with the babies."
Kutcher wound up selling his ticket — something Kunis subsequently came to regret, saying -
"The fact that I didn't let him go into space was so selfish of me."
Speaking with Cheddar News, Kutcher confirmed that Kunis convinced him to get rid of his ticket
on the first Virgin Galactic flight, but promised that he'll get there eventually, vowing -
"At some point, I will be going to space."
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