How Mila Kunis bluffed her age to land That '70s Show
Casting for That '70s Show required every actor to be at least 18. Mila Kunis was 14, so she told the producers she would be 18, without saying when. By the time they worked out the truth, they had decided nobody else fit the part of Jackie Burkhart.
She was born Milena Markovna Kunis on August 14, 1983, into a Jewish family in Chernivtsi, then part of Soviet Ukraine; her mother taught physics and her father was a mechanical engineer. Russian was the language at home. Citing antisemitism and a lack of prospects for their children, the family emigrated in 1991 on a religious-refugee visa, arriving in Los Angeles with $250, and her father went on to drive a cab.
Enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School on her second day in the city without a word of English, she says she cried daily and has no memory of second grade, likening it to being blind and deaf. At nine her father signed her up for after-school acting classes at Beverly Hills Studios, where she met her future manager Susan Curtis. Her first audition won a Barbie commercial, and her first TV roles, on Days of Our Lives and Baywatch, came in 1994.
The sitcom ran for eight seasons from 1998 to 2006 and brought her Young Star Awards in 1999 and 2000. In 1999 she also replaced Lacey Chabert as the voice of Meg Griffin on Family Guy, after Seth MacFarlane called her back and asked her to speak slower and enunciate more; she has voiced Meg ever since. She graduated from Fairfax High School in 2001, having relied on an on-set tutor for most of her teenage schooling.
Film success followed with Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008. Black Swan in 2010 earned her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Supporting Actress, and Ted in 2012, her highest-grossing film, brought a Critics' Choice nomination. She later played the Wicked Witch of the West in Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013 and headlined the comedy Bad Moms in 2016.
Source: Mila Kunis
