Milena Markovna Kunis was born on August 14, 1983, in Chernivtsi, then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union. She was born into a Jewish family and grew up speaking Russian. Her mother, Elvira, had worked as a physics teacher and later managed a pharmacy, while her father, Mark, was trained as a mechanical engineer. The Kunis family was educated and professionally established, but political conditions, limited opportunity and antisemitism contributed to their decision to leave the Soviet Union. When Mila was seven, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles.

The move was far from an effortless Hollywood origin story. Kunis arrived in the United States speaking virtually no English and was placed almost immediately into an American elementary school. She later described those early months as profoundly disorienting because she could not understand the language, culture or people around her. Her parents, meanwhile, effectively restarted their professional lives from the bottom. Her mother took entry-level work before eventually moving into pharmacy management, while her father took whatever work he could find, including driving cabs and delivering pizzas. Kunis has often credited their determination with shaping her own attitude toward work.

Acting entered the picture almost accidentally. When Kunis was nine, her father enrolled her in acting classes at the Beverly Hills Studios, largely as an extracurricular activity. There she met talent manager Susan Curtis, who became instrumental in helping her obtain auditions. Small commercials and television parts followed, including appearances in series such as Days of Our Lives, Baywatch and 7th Heaven. She also appeared in the 1995 film Piranha, a television remake of the 1978 horror movie, long before anyone was mentioning Golden Globes or ballet shoes.

Her breakthrough came in 1998 when she auditioned for a new Fox sitcom called That ’70s Show. Producers were seeking performers who were at least 18 because of working-hour restrictions. Kunis was only 14. The famous story is that she lied about her age, although she later clarified that the deception was considerably more artful than simply inventing a birthday. When producers said performers had to be 18, Kunis told them that she would be 18. This was perfectly true. She simply neglected to mention that several birthdays still stood between her and the required age. Producers discovered the truth during the audition process but decided that she was too good for the role to lose.

Kunis was cast as Jackie Burkhart, the spoiled, wealthy, outspoken girlfriend of Michael Kelso, played by Ashton Kutcher. Jackie could be vain, demanding, selfish and startlingly direct, but Kunis gave her enough vulnerability and comic precision to prevent the character from becoming unbearable. As the series evolved, Jackie became more complicated, forming relationships with several members of the central group and gradually revealing that beneath the confidence was a young woman desperately concerned about status, affection and belonging.

Kunis was significantly younger than most of her castmates, but the difference was not obvious on screen. She developed sharp comic timing and proved especially effective at delivering Jackie's elaborate complaints and high-pitched indignation. Her performances earned her YoungStar Awards in 1999 and 2000, and she remained with the series throughout its original eight-season run from 1998 to 2006. By the time That ’70s Show ended, Kunis had spent much of her adolescence and early adulthood playing the same character.

Only a year after joining That ’70s Show, Kunis acquired another role that would prove even longer-lived. In 1999 she replaced Lacey Chabert as the voice of Meg Griffin on Seth MacFarlane's animated comedy Family Guy. MacFarlane reportedly asked Kunis during the audition process to slow her delivery and enunciate more clearly. She adjusted, returned and won the role.

Meg quickly became the Griffin family's designated target, regularly insulted or ignored by practically everyone around her. Because the character is animated, Kunis could perform Meg without being physically associated with her appearance, and the role became an unusual parallel career running alongside her live-action work. Decades later, Kunis has said that her voice is sometimes more recognizable than her face. She noted in 2025 that while wearing a mask she could move around relatively unnoticed until she spoke, at which point someone would inevitably recognize Meg Griffin.

After That ’70s Show, Kunis faced the familiar problem of escaping a successful television character. She appeared in movies during the sitcom years, but her true film breakthrough came with the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, starring Jason Segel and Kristen Bell. Kunis played Rachel Jansen, a hotel employee in Hawaii who becomes romantically involved with Segel's recently dumped character Peter Bretter.

Rachel was warmer, more grounded and considerably less shrill than Jackie Burkhart, giving Kunis an opportunity to demonstrate a different comic style. Instead of dominating scenes through sheer volume, she used dry humor, relaxed delivery and an easy chemistry with Segel. The performance was widely regarded as evidence that Kunis could move beyond television and function effectively as a leading film actress.

Her next few films expanded her range further. She appeared as assassin Mona Sax in the 2008 action film Max Payne and played a supporting role in the 2010 post-apocalyptic drama The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington. Neither role depended primarily on the sort of comedy that had made her famous, but the film that permanently changed perceptions of her acting ability was Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.

Natalie Portman had been developing the ballet-themed psychological thriller with Aronofsky and suggested Kunis for the role of Lily, a dancer who becomes both rival and temptation to Portman's obsessive ballerina Nina Sayers. During a conversation between the two actresses, Portman learned that Kunis had taken ballet classes as a child and immediately thought she might be right for the part. Kunis's childhood ballet experience was modest, but the casting decision eventually led her into one of the most demanding preparations of her career.

Professional ballet requires years of conditioning and technical development, and neither actress could simply arrive on set and imitate it convincingly. Kunis trained intensely for months, combining ballet work with cardiovascular exercise and Pilates while dramatically altering her body for the role. She later recalled spending extraordinarily long days dancing and suffering bruised ribs and a dislocated shoulder during production. The physical transformation was so extreme that Kunis has repeatedly described Black Swan as one of the most difficult experiences of her career.

The effort paid off. Lily was deliberately constructed as the opposite of Nina. Where Nina was tightly controlled, technically precise and consumed by perfection, Lily appeared instinctive, sensual and emotionally freer. Kunis did not need enormous amounts of dialogue to create tension. Her relaxed physicality and ambiguous motives allowed the audience to wonder whether Lily truly threatened Nina or whether much of the danger existed inside Nina's increasingly unstable mind.

Black Swan became both a commercial and critical success, and Kunis received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress as well as a Screen Actors Guild nomination. The role fundamentally altered the way she was perceived in Hollywood. The girl who had spent years yelling at Kelso was suddenly being discussed alongside some of the most acclaimed dramatic performers of the year.

Kunis did not respond to the acclaim by abandoning comedy. In fact, she has repeatedly rejected the idea that dramatic acting is inherently more difficult or important than making people laugh. She has argued that both require an actor to create believable emotions, whether the result is tears or laughter. That attitude helps explain a career that has comfortably moved back and forth between prestige drama and films involving talking teddy bears.

In 2011 she starred opposite Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits, playing Jamie, a New York headhunter who attempts to maintain a purely physical relationship with Timberlake's Dylan. Naturally, because this was a romantic comedy and not a documentary about efficient relationship management, the arrangement became emotionally complicated. Kunis's direct, energetic performance helped make the film a commercial success and confirmed that she could carry a mainstream romantic comedy.

The following year brought Ted, Seth MacFarlane's feature-film directing debut. Mark Wahlberg starred as John Bennett, whose childhood teddy bear has magically come to life and grown into an extremely inappropriate adult companion. Kunis played John's girlfriend Lori, who understandably begins wondering whether a grown man should perhaps spend slightly less time drinking with his foul-mouthed stuffed animal. The film became one of Kunis's biggest commercial hits.

In 2013 she entered large-scale fantasy filmmaking with Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. Kunis played Theodora, initially a kind-hearted witch whose romantic disappointment and manipulation ultimately transform her into the Wicked Witch of the West. The role allowed Kunis to move from innocence to rage while buried beneath increasingly elaborate makeup, proving once again that Hollywood will eventually paint almost any successful actor green if given sufficient budget.

She continued mixing genres, appearing in the science-fiction adventure Jupiter Ascending in 2015 and then returning to comedy with Bad Moms in 2016. The latter became another important hit. Kunis played Amy Mitchell, an exhausted mother attempting to meet impossible standards at home, work and school while discovering that the pursuit of perfect motherhood is an excellent way to become furious with everyone.

The movie, which also starred Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn, connected strongly with audiences and generated A Bad Moms Christmas the following year. Kunis had recently become a mother herself when she made the first film and said that working on a comedy after childbirth appealed to her because she wanted to spend her workdays in a lighter emotional environment rather than inhabiting something dark.

Her later film work continued to move between comedy, drama and thrillers. She starred in The Spy Who Dumped Me opposite Kate McKinnon, appeared in Four Good Days with Glenn Close and played Ani Fanelli in the 2022 Netflix drama Luckiest Girl Alive. The latter role was considerably darker than much of Kunis's recent work, placing her at the center of a story involving trauma, reinvention and the damaging consequences of carefully constructing a perfect public identity.

Kunis has also moved into producing. She founded Orchard Farm Productions and has increasingly participated behind the scenes rather than limiting herself to acting assignments. Her interest in producing reflects the same pragmatic attitude that has characterized much of her career: acting provides opportunities, but having a hand in developing projects offers greater control over what eventually reaches the screen.

Her personal life contains one of Hollywood's more improbable full-circle stories. Kunis met Ashton Kutcher when they were teenagers working on That ’70s Show. Their characters Jackie and Kelso dated on the series, but the actors themselves were not romantically involved at the time. Years after the program ended, they reconnected socially as adults, began dating and eventually married in 2015. They have two children, daughter Wyatt and son Dimitri.

The fact that Kunis eventually married the actor who played her first major television boyfriend has naturally delighted fans of That ’70s Show, although Kunis and Kutcher have generally treated the coincidence with more amusement than destiny. They had known each other for years and developed their adult relationship long after their sitcom romance had ended.

Kunis has also remained closely connected to the immigrant experience that shaped her childhood. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she spoke publicly about experiencing a renewed emotional connection to the country where she was born. Kunis and Kutcher launched a fundraising campaign to support humanitarian relief for Ukrainians displaced by the war, rapidly raising tens of millions of dollars.

Her relationship with her Jewish heritage has likewise evolved. Kunis has explained that religion was not openly practiced during her childhood in the Soviet Union and that she had been taught not to discuss being Jewish. As an adult in the United States, however, she has increasingly incorporated Jewish traditions into family life, particularly because her children developed an interest in learning about their heritage.

Kunis has also experienced a significant eye condition. She revealed that chronic iritis had caused partial blindness in one eye for years before corrective surgery. She also has heterochromia, meaning her eyes are naturally different colors. The condition has become one of those details that many viewers notice only after somebody points it out, at which point they immediately wonder how they managed not to see it for the previous twenty years.

Despite growing up in entertainment, Kunis has generally avoided cultivating the traditional celebrity lifestyle. She does not maintain a public social-media presence and has spoken openly about preferring a degree of separation from commentary about herself. In a 2025 interview she revealed that she does anonymously watch short-form videos, particularly cooking content and historical material. At one point, she became absorbed in videos about Henry VIII—a wonderfully reassuring reminder that even successful Hollywood actresses can accidentally lose an evening to Tudor England.

That same interview produced an even less predictable revelation: Kunis serves as president of her local homeowners association. After decades of television and film, she has apparently reached the stage of life where global fame coexists with fielding neighborhood complaints and requesting repair estimates. There is something magnificently ordinary about imagining the Wicked Witch of the West reviewing landscaping proposals before lunch.

Her career is particularly notable because she avoided several common traps facing young performers. Kunis began acting professionally as a child, spent eight seasons on a successful sitcom and could easily have been permanently associated with Jackie Burkhart. Instead, she developed a second long-running identity through Family Guy, broke into feature films through Forgetting Sarah Marshall, earned major critical recognition with Black Swan and then established herself as a reliable comedy lead.

Those careers require different skills. Jackie depended upon exaggerated comic confidence. Meg Griffin exists almost entirely through Kunis's voice. Lily in Black Swan depended heavily upon physical performance and ambiguity. Rachel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall required warmth and naturalism, while Bad Moms demanded broad comedy without losing the recognizably exhausted woman beneath it.

Kunis's longevity also owes something to her willingness not to treat career progression as a straight line. She has never appeared particularly interested in maintaining a carefully polished image of seriousness simply because Black Swan brought prestigious recognition. She could earn a Golden Globe nomination in one project and then appear opposite an offensive teddy bear without behaving as though one form of acting diminished the other.

That flexibility has allowed her to remain recognizable to audiences who encountered her at completely different stages. Viewers who grew up in the late 1990s may still immediately think of Jackie Burkhart. Others know her primarily as Meg Griffin. Film audiences remember Black Swan, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Ted, Friends with Benefits or Bad Moms. Younger viewers may encounter her through Netflix projects without realizing that she had already been working professionally for decades.

The distance between the seven-year-old immigrant who entered an American classroom unable to understand English and the internationally recognized actress she became is considerable. Kunis's parents took enormous risks by abandoning established careers and beginning again in the United States, and their daughter effectively followed the same philosophy within her own profession: work, adapt and keep going.

Mila Kunis may have entered television through one of the cleverest technically truthful answers ever given at an audition, but she remained there because the talent behind it was real. Jackie Burkhart made her famous, Family Guy gave her one of television's longest-running roles, and Black Swan demonstrated that the comedian could comfortably enter darker territory.

More than thirty years after her first professional roles, Kunis has become difficult to categorize—which is usually a very good sign for an actor.

Besides, anyone who can survive Hollywood from the age of nine and eventually wind up running a homeowners association has clearly developed a formidable tolerance for difficult people.