Mila Kunis

Info

Full Name: Milena Markovna Kunis
Date of birth: August 14, 1983 (43 years old)
Location: Chernivtsi
Country: Ukraine

Mila Kunis has been active for 29 years, participating in 25 movies that average a 5.5/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

She was fourteen when she turned up to audition for 'That '70s Show', a job that was only open to actors over eighteen. Asked how old she was, she said she'd be eighteen on her next birthday. Nobody thought to ask which one. That's how Mila Kunis got into American television, and it's a fair summary of how she has operated ever since: a bit cheeky, very practical.

She was born in Chernivtsi, in what is now Ukraine and was then still the Soviet Union, on 14 August 1983, and named Milena Markovna Kunis. Her Jewish family left for Los Angeles in 1991 with 250 dollars between them. She was seven and didn't speak a word of English. She has said she blanked out that entire school year because she cried every day, unable to follow the language, the people or anything happening around her.

Her parents, a mechanical engineer and a physics teacher, took whatever work came up. At nine she was signed up for acting classes in Beverly Hills, more as an after school activity than a career plan, and the first commercials followed soon after.

Jackie Burkhart and a voice that won't stop

The Fox sitcom kept her busy from 1998 to 2006 alongside Topher Grace, Laura Prepon, Danny Masterson, Wilmer Valderrama and Ashton Kutcher. Her Jackie Burkhart, the insufferable rich girl of the group, ended up one of the show's best loved characters. Her first kiss, on screen and off, was with Kutcher, and she was still a schoolgirl at the time.

In 1999 she took over from Lacey Chabert as the voice of Meg Griffin in 'Family Guy'. More than a quarter of a century on she's still there, playing the eldest daughter and permanent punchline of Seth MacFarlane's cartoon family. Before any of that she had already popped up in 'Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves' (1997) and as the teenage Gia Carangi in the HBO film 'Gia' (1998).

The flea market that led to 'Black Swan'

Cinema took a while to take her seriously. Her first proper role came with 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' (2008), where she played a hotel receptionist opposite Jason Segel. What followed was a scattergun few years: the hitwoman in 'Max Payne' (2008), the grifter who talks her way onto a factory floor in Mike Judge's 'Extract' (2009), the survivor travelling with Denzel Washington in 'The Book of Eli' (2010) and a quick comic turn in 'Date Night' (2010).

The role that changed things came about by accident. Natalie Portman bumped into her at a flea market, ballet came up in conversation, and Portman went on to recommend her to Darren Aronofsky while wildly overselling experience Kunis simply didn't have. She took the job anyway: five hours of training a day for months, nine kilos lost, a torn ligament and a dislocated shoulder along the way.

The result was Lily, the rival dancer in 'Black Swan' (2010), which brought her the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the Venice Film Festival plus Golden Globe and SAG nominations. When the shoot wrapped she swore she'd never dance again.

Box office, comedy and one enormous flop

The following decade was mostly spent in mainstream comedy. 'Friends with Benefits' (2011) with Justin Timberlake, 'Ted' (2012) with Mark Wahlberg and MacFarlane's foul mouthed bear, still the biggest commercial hit she's been part of, and 'Oz, The Great and Powerful' (2013), in which Sam Raimi turned her into the Wicked Witch of the West opposite James Franco and Michelle Williams.

Not everything landed. 'Jupiter Ascending' (2015), the space opera from Lana and Lilly Wachowski with Channing Tatum and Eddie Redmayne, sank without trace. She bounced back almost immediately with 'Bad Moms' (2016), a cheap comedy that cleaned up at the box office and got a Christmas sequel in 'A Bad Mom's Christmas' (2017), and with the daft action of 'The Spy Who Dumped Me' (2018) alongside Kate McKinnon.

Producing so she can pick

In 2014 she set up her own company, Orchard Farm Productions, and has been edging away from the safe stuff ever since. In 'Four Good Days' (2020) she played a heroin addict trying to stay clean for a weekend under the eye of her mother, Glenn Close, directed by Rodrigo García. Two years later she produced and starred in 'Luckiest Girl Alive', an adaptation of the Jessica Knoll bestseller that went straight to the top of the Netflix charts.

Since then have come 'Goodrich' (2024), a family drama with Michael Keaton, and her small town police chief in 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery' (2025), the third case for Rian Johnson's detective. By her own account she read the script and volunteered before anyone had offered her the part.

Life off the set

She was with Macaulay Culkin from 2002 to 2011, a long and unusually private relationship that ended quietly. Not long after, she and Kutcher found each other again: they started dating in 2012, got engaged in February 2014, had their daughter Wyatt Isabelle that October and married on 4 July 2015 at a ranch in Oak Glen, California. Their son Dimitri Portwood arrived in November 2016.

The couple keep a house rule she has explained more than once: they never shoot at the same time, and neither takes a job away from home while the children are in school. In practice that works out at roughly one film a year.

In March 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two of them launched the Stand With Ukraine campaign, which raised more than 37 million dollars for refugees with Airbnb and Flexport and to which they contributed three million of their own. Kunis calls herself Ukrainian even though Russian was the language at home and she never learned Ukrainian. That same year Time put her on its list of the hundred most influential people in the world.

There have been rougher patches too. In 2023 the letters she and Kutcher sent to the judge asking for leniency for Danny Masterson, convicted of rape, drew a fierce backlash and forced the couple into a public video apology.

One curiosity for the record: she has one eye of each colour, and it isn't something she was born with. It was left by chronic iritis that kept her effectively blind in one eye for years, until surgery sorted it out in 2010 with barely anyone noticing. In 2018, when Harvard's Hasty Pudding named her Woman of the Year, she warned she wouldn't have collected the prize had the club, closed to women for almost two centuries, not announced that week that it would finally let them join the cast.

She still moves between the two worlds that made her. In 2026 she shot 'Nightwatching', a home invasion thriller produced by Ridley Scott on which she is also a producer, and every season she's back in the booth recording Meg Griffin. Nearly thirty years after that fib in the audition room, she remains hard to pin down.