An anguished shriek sounds as Mila Kunis speaks—as if a man has been attacked, or worse. It’s the kind of effect that belongs in a torrid thriller, the kind of murder-mystery that would lure super-detective Benoit Blanc. It’s also familiar to anyone raised on films like Just Married or The Butterfly Effect. To me, it sounds like Ashton Kutcher.

Mila Kunis is unfazed by the off-camera outcry, triggered, apparently, by her reveal of the reality television universe she would infiltrate (The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which the actor watches religiously alongside The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, The Bachelor, and The Bachelorette).

“[Ashton] is highly offended by The Real Housewives—that’s a show that I watched by myself on the treadmill. He hates cattiness and doesn’t like women being unkind…I quit Salt Lake City because she was married to her [step] grandpa. I was like, ‘I can’t,’ but I’ve really stuck it out with Beverly Hills.”

Kunis, with a laundry list of accomplishments under her belt, loves reality TV and loves real cinema. She loves drugstore makeup, yet also, she swears by celebrity facialists. This is not a demonstration of calculated relatability—the Ukraine-born actor has adapted to (welcomed, even) the circumstances of Mila Kunis, but Milena has never been out of the picture.

In the latest Knives Out installment, Kunis embraces another paradox. She plays a small-town police chief alongside Daniel Craig’s iconic Blanc—one of the few parts in recent memory that makes no reference to her femininity or beauty, and sees her stepping into a role traditionally reserved for—let’s be honest—a grizzled, cis-het man. Two truths can exist at once, winks writer-director Rian Johnson—who chose Kunis deliberately—a nuance that Hollywood, which famously traffics in “types,” so often ignores.

Hollywood is top of mind right now. As is coexistence. We’re speaking one day after the industry outcry over the signing of AI actor Tilly Norwood. Kunis hasn’t heard of Miss Norwood, but the trajectory doesn’t concern her.

“Here’s the thing, really,” she says. “I’m not mad at AI at all. I think that both things can exist. You can have a typewriter and you can still have a computer. One does not negate the other...I think technology is going to be interesting and creative, but we’re also always going to have human interaction. I’m not worried about it.”

Kunis and Kutcher are famous early adopters of new technology; Kutcher was one of the first celebrities on X, and Kunis’ production company helped release animated series Stoner Cats as NFTs before people could even articulate the acronym. Not everyone is so comfortable dancing on the cutting-edge.

“I heard my name and I heard the words ‘cutting-edge,’” says Kutcher, suddenly appearing on screen, “And I thought, ‘What could be happening?’”

“We’re talking AI actors,” Kunis explains.

“We’ve been doing green dots for how long?” adds Kutcher.

“The amount of content we’ve done with AI already, everybody’s so afraid of it.”

“The Ted movie was a stick in a ball,” Kunis points out, referring to the Seth MacFarlane hit she starred in opposite Mark Wahlberg. “There was pushback to CGI. I remember because in the 80s Labyrinth was made with puppets. I think both can live.”

If we’re going to address Mila Kunis’s creative qualms, then we need to pivot to romantic comedies. The actor starred in some of the most seminal contributions to the genre—Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Friends With Benefits among them—and has felt the drought as much as any of us. In response to why rom-coms have been more lackluster in recent years, she goes on an off-the-record rant about the industry, then redirects me to ask Kate Hudson, who she says is “unbelievable at that stuff.”

“You know what? I don’t know [what’s wrong],” she concludes. “Because I think about it all the time. I’m desperate to make a romantic comedy. I want to make an amazing romantic comedy, and I haven’t found a great script.”

Kunis has “perfected the art of saying ‘pass’”—likely because she’s been spoiled with past material. While her commitment to being present for her children means that she will now only shoot on location during the summertime (Knives Out was filmed outside of London), there was once a time where the lengths she’s gone for a part were extensive. To accurately portray a ballet dancer in Black Swan, she danced eight hours every day for six months, on a 1200 calorie diet.

“I think my kids consume more than that,” she says. “The only thing that I treated myself to was the McDonald’s giant coffees with creamer. But I knew for a visual, I needed to look a certain way…The second that it ended, the amount of Panda Express and In-N-Out I ate, I probably caused myself more damage. But I was like, ‘I’m done.’ It wasn’t a choice that I was going to continue with.”

In 2019, Kunis did it all again, this time for Four Good Days, a film that also starred her Knives Out co-lead Glenn Close. “[Female actors] are always screwing up our bodies [for roles],” she says. “There was somebody, they were like, look at the weight this male actor lost. And now we’re like, we lost way more weight than him AND we danced.”

Kunis’s first candid reflection on the grueling experience of Black Swan went instantly viral. She’s no stranger to sparking online fascination, outrage, or obsession—like the time she made recurring donations to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence’s name, prompting the public to retaliate by contributing to pro-life organizations in hers.


“I went, ‘You know what? Good for you. Put your money where your mouth is.’ If you’re super pro-life, I have nothing against it. Go ahead. I’m very proud,” she says. “And if that happened today, oh my God, I’d be canceled...I think that’s when the trajectory of extremism began, when people’s headlines became so bold and brazen and big words were used, and it was very effective. And people never read the article.”

Clickbait headlines “fully roll off,” Kunis says—she doesn’t read reviews, look at red carpet photos, and she’s not on social media. “Why would I want to feel bad about myself? I have no clue if you hate me. I’m assuming you love me. I think you must think I’m amazing.”

In real life, however, Mila has become more aware of how she’s received. The #MeToo movement has changed things for the star, not because she was ever victimized on set, but because her comedic style leans toward the irreverent in a way that is brazen, and at times, boundary-edging.

“The whole movement affected a lot of things—the way that people speak to one another, the way that people refer to one another,” she explains. “I have to pick and choose who I’m jokey with. I can’t assume that everyone finds me as funny as I think I am.”

To be clear, Mila Kunis is really, really charming. It’s completely understandable that the actress has had the career she has, which began with a flash-bang playing a younger Angelina Jolie in supermodel biopic Gia (“I didn’t know who Angelina was, but I was like, ‘Wow, what a pretty lady’”). More than likeable, she’s exceedingly normal. How could this be, I wonder aloud in a verbose, word-salad way, when she’s been rich and famous for almost two decades?

“Melissa, why do you think I’m not an asshole?” the actress asks her publicist, who silently sits our video conference, boiling my question down to its nexus.

Melissa credits Kunis’s upbringing. Her parents didn’t set her up with a Coogan Account—the financial safety net for child actors that requires a mandatory 15% deposit of their gross wages—because they never took any of her earnings. “I was rich and my family was poor, but I didn’t know that I was rich and we were poor. Back then I was like, Hell yeah, I’m working. I don’t have to worry about where I eat and how much that costs. I was like, I’ve peaked.”

When it comes to coming-of-age in Hollywood, sustained success seems to be predicated on two factors—a strong support system, and falling in with the right crowd. Despite their burgeoning fame (and freedom from cellphone surveillance) the cast of That 70s Show—which Kunis joined at age 14—refused to partake in drugs.

“There were no phones, no policing—and I went out and I danced all the time—but in a time where I guess I could have been influenced by something, I was influenced to not do it. When I was in my 20s it looked gross—cocaine on people. I would look at you and be like, ‘What are you doing?’ But with severe drugs and alcohol, I did see a lot of downfall.”

Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, her former That 70s Show co-star and now husband of a decade, crossed paths again years after the show ended, both reeling from breakups. Both were emotionally raw, and after seeing each other at the 2012 Golden Globes, reconnected as just friends. Coincidentally, the previous year, both actors had starred in romantic-comedies that followed friends-turned-ahem, bed buddies-turned-enemies-turned-lovers trope: Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached, opposite Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman, respectively.

“My husband and I made the same movie, and then we lived it out. The crazy part is we got together under the guise of friends-with-benefits as if we didn’t know how these things end. We were like, ‘We’re just going to have fun.’ And then it ended with marriage and kids.”

For Kutcher, though, Kunis was quite the get. In 2011, GQ magazine named Kunis the Knockout of the Year, she was Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive in 2012, number one on “FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World” and second on Men’s Health’s “100 Hottest Women of All-Time” in 2013. The near-constant objectification never affected Kunis, who instead always saw the commercial value in her sex appeal.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what this is. I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m doing it.’ I never promoted myself. I always promoted a project, and oftentimes I was in projects that had a male audience, and I was like, ‘Yeah, come fucking see my movie. You want to look at some cleavage? No problem.’ It never bothered me.”

Where Mila’s heckles were more likely raised was the awards circuit. While Mila admits to relishing praise as much as the next validation-craving creative, she has always refused to sacrifice social energy on “schmoozing”—much to her team’s chagrin.

“I didn’t play the game that other people did,” she says. “To me it always felt gross. If [recognition] happens, it happens, but I’m not here to sell myself to you in any form by being falsely kind…I just want to make movies I want to see.”

Right now, the movies that Kunis wants both in quantity and quality are pure romantic comedies. She’s on the lookout for a good one, sniffing it out with Benoit Blanc-ian instincts. Go Good Will Hunting with it, I suggest, and write the script yourself, Matt and Ben-style. She scoffs at the idea. Mila—Milena—Kunis doesn’t dream of the pretentious pursuit of writing or filmmaking. No. This reality-television-loving, bare-faced girl in a white T-shirt just wants to dress up, and play pretend—that’s the beautiful contradiction that is Mila Kunis.

“I never want to stop [acting]. It’s my favorite thing to do. I have no other skills. This is it. This is as good as it gets.”

Photographed by Domen & Van De Velde

Styled by Bin X. Nguyen

Written by Beatrice Hazlehurst

Hair: Sami Knight

Makeup: Tracey Levy

Nails: Shigeko Taylor

Flaunt Film: Domen & Van De Velde and Laura Berrou

Styling Assistant: Alexandrea Baytion 

Production Assistant: Taylor Stine

Location: Smashbox Studios

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