As a teenager, Mila Kunis had relatively modest ambitions when it came to how she envisioned her future.
“To me, [success] was the idea of owning a car, and owning a house, or having my own place, and being able to pay my bills, and having a dog,” she tells Yahoo Entertainment in a new interview (watch above). I was like, ‘That’s it.’ That’s the pinnacle of success, right?”
Mila Kunis, now 39, is paying her bills through her acting. The That ’70s Show alum has proven to be one of Hollywood’s most successful, prolific actresses over the past 15 years, with eclectic credits including Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Black Swan (2010), Ted (2012), Bad Moms (2016) and Four Good Days (2020).
The Ukrainian-born performer also has two children with husband Ashton Kutcher — and yes, she achieved her goal of becoming a dog owner, too.
Mila Kunis’s latest feature is the Netflix thriller Luckiest Girl Alive, an adaptation of Jessica Knoll’s bestselling 2015 novel about a young woman who seeks to reinvent herself after experiencing a series of traumatic events in her teenage years.
The film deals with two very heavy subject matters: sexual assault and gun violence.
“Each one independently is incredibly complicated and we try to tackle both in one [movie],” Mila Kunis says.
“But I think that when you watch the film as a whole, it’s not there for shock value. It’s not there for anything other than to tell a story, and to keep the story grounded and to help you understand the why, which is what makes this entire story incredibly fascinating is figuring out the why. That is the whole mystery, and this is just one of the extra puzzle pieces that helps you.”
Knoll drew upon her own experience with rape in writing the novel — though the author initially chose to keep private the fact that the story had autobiographical elements in it.