Mila Kunis
Milena Markovna "Mila" Kunis[a] (born August 14, 1983) is an American actress. Born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and raised in Los Angeles, California, Kunis began playing Jackie Burkhart on the Fox television series That '70s Show (1998–2006) at the age of 14. She has voiced Meg Griffin on the Fox animated series Family Guy since 1999.
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Markovna and the family name is Kunis.
Mila Kunis
American
Actress
1994–present
2
Kunis's breakout film role was in the 2008 romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall.[1][2] She gained further critical acclaim and accolades for her performance in the psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), receiving nominations for the SAG Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her other major films include the action films Max Payne (2008) and The Book of Eli (2010), the romantic comedy Friends with Benefits (2011), the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) as the Wicked Witch of the West, and the comedies Ted (2012), Bad Moms (2016) and its sequel, A Bad Moms Christmas (2017).
Early life and education
Milena Markovna Kunis was born into a Ukrainian Jewish family on August 14, 1983,[3] in Chernov'tsi, a city in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine).[4] Although Kunis's parents have since retired,[5] previously her mother, Elvira, was a physics teacher who ran a pharmacy, and her father, Mark Kunis, was a mechanical engineer who worked as a cab driver after the family emigrated.[6] Kunis has an elder brother, Michael.[7][8] Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors.[9] Her mother tongue and the common language within her family is Russian.[10] While participating in Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend Kunis confirmed she does not speak Ukrainian, stating Russian was the main language at the time she was there.[11] Children were not taught Ukrainian in school until they were in second grade which was the time she left to come to the United States.[11] She stated in 2011 that her parents had "amazing jobs", and that she "was very lucky" and the family was "not poor"; they had decided to leave the Soviet Union because they saw "no future" there for Mila and her brother.[12] In 1991, when she was 7 years old, her family moved to Los Angeles, with US$250. "That was all we were allowed to take with us. My parents had given up good jobs and degrees, which were not transferable. We arrived in New York on a Wednesday and by Friday morning my brother and I were at school in L.A."[12]
Kunis has cited antisemitism in the Soviet Union as one of several reasons for her family's move to the United States.[13][14][15][16][17] She has stated that her parents "raised [her] Jewish as much as they could", although religion was suppressed in the Soviet Union.[18][13] On her second day in Los Angeles, Kunis was enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School, not knowing a word of English. She later recalled: "I blocked out second grade completely. I have no recollection of it. I always talk to my mom and my grandma about it. It was because I cried every day. I didn't understand the culture. I didn't understand the people. I didn't understand the language. My first sentence of my essay to get into college was like, 'Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven.' And that's kind of what it felt like moving to the States."[19]
In Los Angeles, she attended Hubert Howe Bancroft Middle School. She used an on-set tutor for most of her high school years while filming That '70s Show.[20] She briefly attended Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), but when that school proved to be insufficiently flexible about her acting commitments, she transferred to Fairfax High School,[21] graduating in 2001.[16] She briefly attended University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.[7][22]
Kunis has said that a genealogical DNA test described her ethnicity as 96%[23][24] to 98% Ashkenazi Jewish.[25]
Career
1994–2000: Career beginnings and television work
At age nine, Kunis was enrolled by her father in acting classes after school at the Beverly Hills Studios, where she met Susan Curtis, who would become her manager.[26][27] On her first audition she landed the role for a Barbie commercial.[28] Shortly after, she did a commercial for the Lisa Frank product line.[29] Her first television roles took place in 1994, first appearing on Days of Our Lives,[30][31] and a few months later doing her first of two appearances on Baywatch.[32] She had a minor role on the television shows 7th Heaven,[20] and Walker, Texas Ranger as well as supporting roles in the films Santa with Muscles, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, and the Angelina Jolie film Gia, as the young Gia Carangi.[7]
At the age of 10, Kunis unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of a Russian Jewish girl who moves to North America in the film Make a Wish, Molly.[9] Instead, she was cast in the secondary role of a Mexican girl.[21] In 1998, Kunis was cast as Jackie Burkhart in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show. All who auditioned were required to be at least 18 years old; Kunis, who was 14 at the time, told the casting directors she would be 18 but did not say when. Though they eventually figured it out, the producers still thought Kunis was the best fit for the role.[27] That '70s Show ran for eight seasons.[33] She won two consecutive Young Star Awards as Best Young Actress in a Comedy TV Series in 1999 and 2000 for her performances.[34]
In 1999, Kunis replaced Lacey Chabert in the role of Meg Griffin on the animated sitcom Family Guy,[35] created by Seth MacFarlane for Fox. Kunis won the role after auditions and a slight rewrite of the character, in part due to her performance on That '70s Show. When Kunis auditioned for the role, she was called back by MacFarlane, who instructed her to speak slower. He then told her to come back another time and enunciate more. Once she claimed that she had it under control, MacFarlane hired her. MacFarlane added: "What Mila Kunis brought to it was in a lot of ways, I thought, almost more right for the character. I say that Lacey did a phenomenal job, but there was something about Mila – something very natural about Mila. She was 15 when she started, so you were listening to a 15-year-old. Oftentimes with animation they'll have adult actors doing the voices of teenagers and they always sound like Saturday morning voices. They sound oftentimes very forced. She had a very natural quality to Meg that really made what we did with that character kind of really work."[36] Kunis was nominated for an Annie Award in the category of Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production in 2007. She also voiced Meg in Family Guy Video Game!, released in 2006. Kunis described her character as "the scapegoat."[37]
2001–2008: Transition to film
In 2001, she appeared in Get Over It opposite Kirsten Dunst. She followed that up in 2002, by starring in the straight-to-DVD horror film American Psycho 2 alongside William Shatner, a sequel to the 2000 film American Psycho. American Psycho 2 was poorly reviewed by critics,[38] and later, Kunis herself expressed embarrassment over the film.[39] In 2004, Kunis starred in the film adaptation Tony n' Tina's Wedding. Although the film was shot in 2004, it did not have a theatrical release until 2007.[40] Most critics did not like the film, which mustered a 25% approval from Rotten Tomatoes.[41] DVD talk concluded that "fans would be much better off pretending the movie never happened in the first place".[42]
Political views
Kunis is a supporter of the Democratic Party.[211] In a 2012 interview, she criticized the Republican Party, saying: "The way that Republicans attack women is so offensive to me. And the way they talk about religion is offensive. I may not be a practicing Jew, but why do we gotta talk about Jesus all the time?"[170] In 2017, Kunis disclosed that she had been making monthly donations to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence's name.[212]