Mila Kunis

The lie that built a career

Mila Kunis landed in Los Angeles in 1991 at age seven, speaking just seven words of English. Her family had fled the Soviet Union with barely 250 dollars in their suitcase. Seven years later she fooled the producers of That ’70s Show by claiming she was 18 years old when she was only 14.

Nobody noticed the deception until she signed the contract.

Jackie Burkhart was her school for eight seasons. But while filming the teen comedy, she landed the role of Meg Griffin in Family Guy in 1999. She still earns a paycheck for voicing the character more than two decades later.

Her move into film was neither immediate nor easy. Before taking on dramas, she read many mediocre comedy scripts. In 2008, the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall broke the mold of the TV actress she had been typecast as.

The Physical Toll of Prestige

In 2010 she dropped to 43 kilos to shoot Black Swan. She trained five hours a day, seven days a week, and followed a strict diet of 1,200 calories. That effort earned her a Golden Globe nomination and the Marcello Mastroianni at the Venice Film Festival.

Her body took a year to return to normal.

The industry quickly capitalized on her commercial appeal. In 2011 she starred in Friends with Benefits opposite Justin Timberlake. The film grossed 150 million dollars and confirmed that her name on a poster guaranteed box office returns.

That's because Kunis has always preferred hard numbers to the mystique of the method actor. In 2012 the film Ted surpassed 549 million dollars in worldwide box office. That success gave her the freedom to choose more personal or daring projects.

Production and damage control

In 2014 she founded her own company, Orchard Farm Productions. She didn't want to sit around waiting for meaningful female roles to come along, so she started developing her own content for television and digital platforms.

The strategy paid off in the long run.

In 2016 she led the cast of Bad Moms. The film cost 20 million dollars and grossed 183 million worldwide. It was a power move in a genre that the industry usually reserved for male-led stories or conventional love stories.

But not everything was commercial success. In 2015, the Wachowski sisters' big-budget epic Jupiter Ascending was panned by critics and barely recouped its 176 million budget. It was a warning about the risks of big sci-fi franchises.

In 2022 she starred in and produced Luckiest Girl Alive for Netflix, adapting Jessica Knoll's book. In 2024 she shot Goodrich alongside Michael Keaton under the direction of Hallie Meyers-Shyer. The production budget of the latter title was estimated at 15 million dollars.