Mila Kunis

Mila Kunis: From Chernivtsi to the Hollywood Hills

She was fourteen and the casting call said eighteen, so she told the producers of a new Fox sitcom that she would be eighteen and declined to specify when. They worked out the truth, decided she was still the right actress for the part, and cast her anyway. Mila Kunis played Jackie Burkhart on That '70s Show for eight seasons, and has been working continuously ever since, in a career built on a habit of walking into rooms she was not technically qualified to enter.

Two Hundred and Fifty Dollars

Milena Markovna Kunis was born on August 14, 1983, in Chernivtsi, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Her family was Jewish and her grandparents survived the Holocaust; genealogical testing has put her Ashkenazi ancestry at 96 to 98 per cent. In 1991, when she was seven, the family left for Los Angeles on a religious-refugee visa with $250 between them, driven out by Soviet antisemitism and the absence of any future they could see for her. Her first language was Russian; she had not learned Ukrainian before emigrating.

She was put into Rosewood Elementary School speaking no English, an experience she has compressed into one of the starker images any performer has offered about their childhood: "Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven." That dislocation is the engine of what follows. She went on to Bancroft Middle School, the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies and Fairfax High School, graduating in 2001, with brief later spells at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.

An After-School Class in Beverly Hills

At nine her father enrolled her in acting classes at Beverly Hills Studios, largely as an activity. There she met Susan Curtis, who became her manager, and her first audition produced a Barbie commercial. A Lisa Frank advertisement followed, then her television debut in 1994 on Days of Our Lives and Baywatch. Four years later came the audition she lied her way into. Jackie, the spoiled rich girl of the Point Place basement, won her consecutive Young Star Awards for Best Young Actress in a Comedy Series in 1999 and 2000, and kept her employed until 2006.

The Longest-Running Job in Television

In 1999 she replaced Lacey Chabert as the voice of Meg Griffin on Family Guy, a role she has now held for more than a quarter of a century and which brought an Annie Award nomination in 2007. It is an odd cornerstone for a leading actress: the show's running joke is that Meg is despised by everyone in it, and Kunis has supplied the voice of that indignity across hundreds of episodes while her film career rose around it.

Being Taken Seriously

Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008 was the break. Joe Morgenstern singled out her "fresh beauty and focused energy," and James Berardinelli noted that she "understands the concept of comic timing," which in a Judd Apatow production is the whole job. Max Payne followed the same year, and by 2010 she was in The Book of Eli and Date Night. Then Friends with Benefits opposite Justin Timberlake in 2011, Ted in 2012, her highest-grossing film, which brought a Critics' Choice nomination for comedy, Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013 as Theodora turned Wicked Witch, Jupiter Ascending in 2015, and the Bad Moms films in 2016 and 2017.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky cast her in 2010 on the strength of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and a recommendation from her close friend Natalie Portman. Kunis trained in ballet four hours a day, seven days a week, held herself to 1,200 calories and lost twenty pounds, tore a ligament and dislocated a shoulder. The performance drew the best notices of her life. Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "Kunis makes a perfect alternate to Portman, equally as lithe and dark but a smirk of self-assurance in place of Portman's wide-eyed fearfulness," and Guy Lodge called her "the surprise package here, intelligently watching and reflecting her co-star." It brought Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations, a Saturn Award, and the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice for best young performer.

Owner, Not Just Employee

In October 2014 she launched Orchard Farm Productions with a first-look deal at ABC Studios. She and Ashton Kutcher, her That '70s Show co-star, whom she began dating in 2012 and married in July 2015, created Quarantine Wine in 2020 and gave all the proceeds to Covid-19 relief, then Outside Wine in 2021 for The Skate Park Project and Thorn. In 2022, after Russia invaded the country she was born in, the couple launched a GoFundMe campaign for refugees, pledged $3 million of their own money and passed a $30 million target by March 18. Time named her one of its hundred most influential people that year; People made her one of its People of the Year. Her later work has leaned dramatic: Four Good Days opposite Glenn Close in 2020, where critics called her a revelation, Luckiest Girl Alive in 2022, Goodrich in 2024 and Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man in 2025.

Why Mila Is Called a Genius

Nothing in the record shows critics using the word about Kunis, and inflating it would misrepresent what she actually does well. Two capacities stand out, and both are forms of intelligence rather than inspiration. The first is comic reading: the ability, noted by reviewers from Forgetting Sarah Marshall onward, to time a line against another actor's rhythm rather than her own, and in Black Swan to do the same thing dramatically. Guy Lodge's phrase for it, "intelligently watching and reflecting her co-star," describes a skill most performers never acquire, because it requires subordinating your own performance to somebody else's.

The second is adaptive nerve, which is where the biography matters. A seven-year-old arriving in Los Angeles unable to understand a word around her became, within seven years, an actress confident enough to lie about her age to network producers and hold the room afterwards. The same instinct built a production company at thirty-one and a $35 million relief campaign at thirty-eight.

The honest counter-case is that this is a strong working career rather than an extraordinary one. She has one performance of real weight, in a film whose gravitational centre was another actress; the rest is competent studio comedy, some of it forgettable, and a voice role that trades on being the butt of a joke. She has never won a major acting award. What she has is durability and judgment, which is not genius but is rarer in Hollywood than talent.

Legacy

Kunis's most lasting contribution may turn out to have nothing to do with film. The refugee child who returned, three decades later, as the co-author of one of the largest celebrity fundraising efforts on record for the country she fled gave the story a symmetry no screenwriter would risk. In the meantime she has spent twenty-five years voicing an unloved teenager on a cartoon, which suggests a performer entirely unconcerned with dignity, and probably explains the longevity.