- 2,051
- 10
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2008
http://www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=19030&page=2
by Margot Dougherty
Los Angeles magazine, September 2009
"I love the Big Blue!" sings Mila Kunis as the Dodgers saunter off the field and the Cincinnati Reds swallow another runless inning. Kunisisn't just paying lip service. She had arrived at the game wearing a sleeveless Dodger jersey over her black tank T-shirt and jeans-baggy, torn at theknee, rolled to midcalf, and quite possibly borrowed from the closet of her boyfriend, Macaulay Culkin. Presented with a Dodger cap, she promptly pulled itdown over hair still wet from a shower and lost no time ordering a hot dog and a root beer, the color of which matches her nail polish. Kunis is no stranger toa ball game. "But this is not where I normally sit," she says of our front-row VIP seats. "This is not where my peeps roll. I'm usually wayup there." She points to the crowd roaring from the upper tiers.
Kunis insists on taking care of our snacks. It's not a feint; it's an unassailable command. "I've got this," she says to the vendor."Don't take her money." In a lot of years of celebrity interviewing, I don't need all of one hand to count the times the subject has offeredto pay. "Then you've been interviewing some pathetic celebrities," Kunis says. "And besides, I'm not a celebrity. I'm a workingactress. There's a massive difference."
In widening circles she is both. TV audiences who missed her eight years as Ashton Kutcher's girlfriend Jackie on That '70s Show mightrecognize her voice from Family Guy instead: For its entire run, and in movie spin-offs, she has portrayed Meg, the long-suffering, eye-rollingdaughter on Fox's animated alt-comedy that is up for an Emmy this month. Last year she starred in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as the irresistiblehotel receptionist who saves Jason Segel from abject humiliation when his ex-girlfriend checks into the same resort with her hypersexed musician boyfriend."I know you're famous," says the woman with a fill-me-in smile sitting next to Kunis at the stadium. The actress assures her she's nobody thewoman should recognize. "My son is sitting over there in the stands," the woman persists. "He's 14. I know he would know you." Kunisobliges with an autograph. "Your mom thinks you might know who I am," she writes in large feminine script, a cartoon heart hovering over thei in "Mila."
The enormous eyes, full mouth, and cascade of dark hair give Kunis the look of a diminutive-five feet four and 110 pounds-and approachable Angelina Jolie.Her effervescence and unbridled laugh belong to an unselfconscious five-year-old. She's a knockout of a tomboy who shared dressing rooms with her male'70s Show costars, and she's also a girl's girl whose best friends include a nurse and a high school counselor she's known sinceelementary school. Kunis learned about baseball "through osmosis": Culkin is a sports fanatic with an ESPN habit. "SportsCenter catchesme up," she says, "and PTI [Pardon the Interruption] and Around the Horn."
Kunis is one of those people who's just plain fun to be around, and her characters exude that magnetism even, as in the case of her new film,Extract, when she's a bad egg. Starring opposite Jason Bateman, the owner of a food-flavoring plant, she plays Cindy, a young woman of obvious sexappeal and dangerous charm. "Wow, did you invent vanilla extract?!" she asks a smitten Bateman during a slam-dunk job interview. "Like, withyour brain?" Cindy's the lively spindle around which the movie, which also features Ben Affleck as a long-haired, pot-cured, bad-advice-dispensingbartender, revolves.
Kunis was in Toronto shooting the thriller Max Payne with Mark Wahlberg-a gig involving a fiercely cold winter, five-inch stilettos, and a gunroughly half her height-when director Mike Judge sent her the Extract script. Even if she hadn't been a fan of Beavis and Butt-Head,which Judge created, and Office Space, his beloved cult movie about a dyspeptic band of computer programmers, Kunis would have been happy for anexcuse to escape for a table reading. "I was like a little kid in a candy shop," she says of bouncing around lines with Affleck and Bateman. "Itwas one of those experiences where I could stand back and go, you know, I'm OK."
In 1991, when she was seven, Kunis emigrated from Chernovtsy, Ukraine, to the United States with her parents, grandparents, and brother. "It was alottery system," she says. "It took about five years. If you got chosen the first time around, you went to Moscow, where there was another lottery,and you maybe got chosen again. Then you could come to the States." On her second day in Los Angeles she enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School notknowing a word of English. The next year, by third grade, she was fluent. (She credits the slow-speaking Bob Barker on The Price Is Right as aninfluential at-home tutor.) "I blocked out second grade," she says. "I don't remember, but my mom tells me that I came home and cried everyday. I wasn't that traumatized. It was just a shock."
With her classic white Adidas (a style she's worn since high school) planted on the back of the Reds' dugout, her hot dog neatly dispatched and acinnamon pretzel in her clutches, Kunis seems as American as it gets. Between intervals of whoops and claps to cheer on her home team, she recaps the life of anewly arrived immigrant family: Her father, a mechanical engineer by training, drove a cab; her mother took a cashier job at a Rite Aid. "All so we couldhave a better life," Kunis says. "We shopped at Payless on a good day, Ross on a holiday. In junior high all I wanted was a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. Wecouldn't afford it. But my mother found a man's Tommy Hilfiger shirt on a back rack at Ross. She bought it for $1.99, took out the tag, and sewed itinto one of my T-shirts. So when I went to gym class, I had my Tommy Hilfiger shirt."
Her parents parked Kunis in acting classes to keep her busy after school. She won small roles as a result and in ninth grade landed the pilot for That'70s Show. She's worked consistently since, and in the past few years the wattage of her costars has intensified. She recently wrappedThe Book of Eli opposite Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, plays a stripper in Date Night with James Franco, and two hours beforegame time Darren Aronofsky, who directed Mickey Rourke to a prizewinning comeback in The Wrestler, cast her as a ballerina opposite Natalie Portman inBlack Swan. But Kunis, who lives a few blocks from her parents (the farthest apart they've ever resided) and cites her mother's kitchen as herfavorite restaurant, makes no assumptions about the future. "I can be working today, and tomorrow you'll never hear of me again," she says."This is an awful business."
By the seventh-inning stretch, the Dodgers have 12 runs, the Reds only 1. Manny Ramirez, hit by a fastball while at bat, has been taken to HuntingtonHospital for X rays. (No harm done-he'll hit a three-run homer the next night.) Kunis has shown me where the pitch speed is flashed and explained that, no,there were not two runners on first; one was a base coach. "There are coaches at first and third," she says without a trace of condescension,although even Stewie, the effete baby on Family Guy, or for that matter Brian the dog, would know this. Not long after belting "Take Me Out tothe Ball Game" with the 48,000-strong crowd (never leave a game before "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Kunis says), we decide the Big Blue'slead is irreversible, and it's safe to call it a night. As we file out, one of the Reds looks up and sees Kunis. Her Dodger regalia notwithstanding, herolls her a ball over the dugout roof.
by Margot Dougherty
Los Angeles magazine, September 2009
"I love the Big Blue!" sings Mila Kunis as the Dodgers saunter off the field and the Cincinnati Reds swallow another runless inning. Kunisisn't just paying lip service. She had arrived at the game wearing a sleeveless Dodger jersey over her black tank T-shirt and jeans-baggy, torn at theknee, rolled to midcalf, and quite possibly borrowed from the closet of her boyfriend, Macaulay Culkin. Presented with a Dodger cap, she promptly pulled itdown over hair still wet from a shower and lost no time ordering a hot dog and a root beer, the color of which matches her nail polish. Kunis is no stranger toa ball game. "But this is not where I normally sit," she says of our front-row VIP seats. "This is not where my peeps roll. I'm usually wayup there." She points to the crowd roaring from the upper tiers.
Kunis insists on taking care of our snacks. It's not a feint; it's an unassailable command. "I've got this," she says to the vendor."Don't take her money." In a lot of years of celebrity interviewing, I don't need all of one hand to count the times the subject has offeredto pay. "Then you've been interviewing some pathetic celebrities," Kunis says. "And besides, I'm not a celebrity. I'm a workingactress. There's a massive difference."
In widening circles she is both. TV audiences who missed her eight years as Ashton Kutcher's girlfriend Jackie on That '70s Show mightrecognize her voice from Family Guy instead: For its entire run, and in movie spin-offs, she has portrayed Meg, the long-suffering, eye-rollingdaughter on Fox's animated alt-comedy that is up for an Emmy this month. Last year she starred in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as the irresistiblehotel receptionist who saves Jason Segel from abject humiliation when his ex-girlfriend checks into the same resort with her hypersexed musician boyfriend."I know you're famous," says the woman with a fill-me-in smile sitting next to Kunis at the stadium. The actress assures her she's nobody thewoman should recognize. "My son is sitting over there in the stands," the woman persists. "He's 14. I know he would know you." Kunisobliges with an autograph. "Your mom thinks you might know who I am," she writes in large feminine script, a cartoon heart hovering over thei in "Mila."
The enormous eyes, full mouth, and cascade of dark hair give Kunis the look of a diminutive-five feet four and 110 pounds-and approachable Angelina Jolie.Her effervescence and unbridled laugh belong to an unselfconscious five-year-old. She's a knockout of a tomboy who shared dressing rooms with her male'70s Show costars, and she's also a girl's girl whose best friends include a nurse and a high school counselor she's known sinceelementary school. Kunis learned about baseball "through osmosis": Culkin is a sports fanatic with an ESPN habit. "SportsCenter catchesme up," she says, "and PTI [Pardon the Interruption] and Around the Horn."
Kunis is one of those people who's just plain fun to be around, and her characters exude that magnetism even, as in the case of her new film,Extract, when she's a bad egg. Starring opposite Jason Bateman, the owner of a food-flavoring plant, she plays Cindy, a young woman of obvious sexappeal and dangerous charm. "Wow, did you invent vanilla extract?!" she asks a smitten Bateman during a slam-dunk job interview. "Like, withyour brain?" Cindy's the lively spindle around which the movie, which also features Ben Affleck as a long-haired, pot-cured, bad-advice-dispensingbartender, revolves.
Kunis was in Toronto shooting the thriller Max Payne with Mark Wahlberg-a gig involving a fiercely cold winter, five-inch stilettos, and a gunroughly half her height-when director Mike Judge sent her the Extract script. Even if she hadn't been a fan of Beavis and Butt-Head,which Judge created, and Office Space, his beloved cult movie about a dyspeptic band of computer programmers, Kunis would have been happy for anexcuse to escape for a table reading. "I was like a little kid in a candy shop," she says of bouncing around lines with Affleck and Bateman. "Itwas one of those experiences where I could stand back and go, you know, I'm OK."
In 1991, when she was seven, Kunis emigrated from Chernovtsy, Ukraine, to the United States with her parents, grandparents, and brother. "It was alottery system," she says. "It took about five years. If you got chosen the first time around, you went to Moscow, where there was another lottery,and you maybe got chosen again. Then you could come to the States." On her second day in Los Angeles she enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School notknowing a word of English. The next year, by third grade, she was fluent. (She credits the slow-speaking Bob Barker on The Price Is Right as aninfluential at-home tutor.) "I blocked out second grade," she says. "I don't remember, but my mom tells me that I came home and cried everyday. I wasn't that traumatized. It was just a shock."
With her classic white Adidas (a style she's worn since high school) planted on the back of the Reds' dugout, her hot dog neatly dispatched and acinnamon pretzel in her clutches, Kunis seems as American as it gets. Between intervals of whoops and claps to cheer on her home team, she recaps the life of anewly arrived immigrant family: Her father, a mechanical engineer by training, drove a cab; her mother took a cashier job at a Rite Aid. "All so we couldhave a better life," Kunis says. "We shopped at Payless on a good day, Ross on a holiday. In junior high all I wanted was a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. Wecouldn't afford it. But my mother found a man's Tommy Hilfiger shirt on a back rack at Ross. She bought it for $1.99, took out the tag, and sewed itinto one of my T-shirts. So when I went to gym class, I had my Tommy Hilfiger shirt."
Her parents parked Kunis in acting classes to keep her busy after school. She won small roles as a result and in ninth grade landed the pilot for That'70s Show. She's worked consistently since, and in the past few years the wattage of her costars has intensified. She recently wrappedThe Book of Eli opposite Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, plays a stripper in Date Night with James Franco, and two hours beforegame time Darren Aronofsky, who directed Mickey Rourke to a prizewinning comeback in The Wrestler, cast her as a ballerina opposite Natalie Portman inBlack Swan. But Kunis, who lives a few blocks from her parents (the farthest apart they've ever resided) and cites her mother's kitchen as herfavorite restaurant, makes no assumptions about the future. "I can be working today, and tomorrow you'll never hear of me again," she says."This is an awful business."
By the seventh-inning stretch, the Dodgers have 12 runs, the Reds only 1. Manny Ramirez, hit by a fastball while at bat, has been taken to HuntingtonHospital for X rays. (No harm done-he'll hit a three-run homer the next night.) Kunis has shown me where the pitch speed is flashed and explained that, no,there were not two runners on first; one was a base coach. "There are coaches at first and third," she says without a trace of condescension,although even Stewie, the effete baby on Family Guy, or for that matter Brian the dog, would know this. Not long after belting "Take Me Out tothe Ball Game" with the 48,000-strong crowd (never leave a game before "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Kunis says), we decide the Big Blue'slead is irreversible, and it's safe to call it a night. As we file out, one of the Reds looks up and sees Kunis. Her Dodger regalia notwithstanding, herolls her a ball over the dugout roof.
