Mila Kunis, the actress who chose the comedy over the Oscar campaign — and built something better

Mila Kunis

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	August 14, 1983 Chernivtsi, Ukraine (then Soviet Union)
Occupation	Actress, voice actress, producer
Known for	Black Swan, Ted, Friends with Benefits
Awards	Marcello Mastroianni Award, Best Young Actor/Actress, 67th Venice Film Festival (Black Swan, 2010) · Saturn Award, Best Supporting Actress (Black Swan, 2010) · Golden Globe · SAG Award · Young Star Award, Best Young Actress in TV Series (1999, 2000)

There is a version of Mila Kunis’s career that makes perfect sense on paper: immigrant girl arrives in Los Angeles, enrolls in acting class because her father heard an ad on the radio, lies about her age at fourteen to land a part on a hit television show, trains obsessively to play a rival ballet dancer opposite Natalie Portman, wins at Venice, gets nominated for a Golden Globe. That version ends with a particular kind of career — one built around careful choices, awards-season strategies, and serious directors. Mila Kunis looked at that version and chose Ted instead.

Milena Markovna Kunis was born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine — then still part of the Soviet Union — into a Jewish family whose grandparents had survived the Holocaust. When she was seven, her parents made the decision that had been forming for years: they gathered what they could, approximately $250, and flew to Los Angeles. Her father, Mark, had been a mechanical engineer in Ukraine; in America he delivered pizzas and painted houses. Her mother, Elvira, had taught physics; in America she worked in a pharmacy. The city they arrived in spoke no Russian and did not especially care to. “I cried every day,” Kunis recalled of second grade. “I didn’t understand the culture. I didn’t understand the people. I didn’t understand the language.”

Her father enrolled her in acting classes at the Beverly Hills Studios when she was nine — he had heard an advertisement on the radio — and a manager noticed her. By fourteen she was auditioning for That ’70s Show, which required its cast to be eighteen. She told the casting team she “would be eighteen” — technically accurate in the sense that most fourteen-year-olds will eventually reach that age — and they hired her. She played Jackie Burkhart for eight seasons and won consecutive Young Star Awards in 1999 and 2000. In the same year she joined the show, she also began voicing Meg Griffin on Family Guy, replacing Lacey Chabert. She has voiced Meg continuously for more than twenty-five years, through the show’s revival, its peak ratings, and its gradual conversion into an institution.

The film career came later and differently. Her 2008 role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall — as Rachel, the hotel worker with the patience for a heartbroken stranger — introduced her to critics who had not been paying attention. Darren Aronofsky cast her in Black Swan after seeing that performance, reportedly on Natalie Portman’s recommendation. What followed was four months of daily ballet training, a 1,200-calorie diet, twenty pounds lost, a dislocated shoulder, and a torn ligament. The film premiered at Venice in 2010 and was nominated for five Academy Awards. Kunis won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the festival for Best Young Actor or Actress, received a Golden Globe nomination, a Screen Actors Guild nomination, and a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress. Critics recognized something they had not been looking for.

And then she made Ted.

This is not a criticism. Ted, the 2012 comedy in which she plays the girlfriend of a man whose childhood teddy bear has come to life, earned $549 million worldwide and remains the highest-grossing film she has appeared in. Friends with Benefits, the year before, had earned $149 million. Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013, where she played the Wicked Witch, earned $493 million. The argument that she had abandoned something after Venice assumes that she wanted the thing she was supposed to want. The evidence suggests otherwise. She chose projects that audiences showed up for, built a bankable name in the comedy space, and worked consistently without the obligation to justify every choice to an awards committee.

The difficult entry in her public record arrived in 2023. Danny Masterson, her co-star from That ’70s Show, had been convicted of two counts of forcible rape and sentenced to thirty years to life in prison. Kunis and her husband Ashton Kutcher — who had also worked with Masterson on the show — each submitted character support letters to the court describing him in terms of his “innate goodness.” Kunis called him an “outstanding older brother figure.” The backlash was significant and specific: Kutcher co-chaired Thorn, an anti-child-trafficking organization, and the contradiction between that work and supporting a convicted rapist in sentencing documents was not subtle. They released a video apology. One of Masterson’s victims described it as “incredibly insulting and hurtful.” There is no clean way to narrate this. It is the most consequential public misjudgment of either of their careers.

Her more recent work has leaned into roles with weight. Four Good Days (2020), in which she played a woman fighting addiction opposite Glenn Close, drew comparisons to what critics felt was her best dramatic work — Richard Roeper called it “the finest work she has done.” Luckiest Girl Alive (2022), which she also produced, earned similar notices. In 2024, she appeared alongside Michael Keaton in Goodrich, on which she served as executive producer. Late 2025 brought her into the third Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man, directed by Rian Johnson and released on Netflix in December — a small role as a small-town police chief that divided critics, some of whom found her performance flat.

Kunis married Kutcher in July 2015; they have two children, a daughter born in October 2014 and a son in November 2016. She has been open about her past health struggles: a chronic condition affecting one eye caused temporary partial blindness before surgery corrected it. She has heterochromia — her left eye is brown, her right eye is green. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she organized refugee relief that exceeded a $30 million goal, personally contributing $3 million.

In 2026, she is in production on Nightwatching, an adaptation of Tracy Sierra’s psychological thriller novel in which she plays a mother fighting for her children’s survival during a winter storm. She is also producing. The film is directed by Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, with Ridley Scott‘s Scott Free Productions attached; Amazon MGM Studios will distribute internationally. A romance project for Skydance, The 47 Night Stand, is in development, also with Kunis as producer. After thirty years in the industry — from that first audition at fourteen through a Venice prize and a Knives Out entry and a producing career she built herself — she is still making the choices that make sense to her, and not necessarily to anyone else.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan, mila kunis, Natalie Portman

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