In the spirit of our previous 18 things about Israeli actresses we adore (Gal Gadot and Yael Grobglas), we are expanding the series to include all Jewish actresses. We’re expanding the series for two reasons: one, technicalllllllly they could be Israeli if they made aliyah, and two, we make up our own rules (and we really wanted to write about Mila Kunis).
Read on for 18 things you may not know about the one and only Mila Kunis, who rose to fame at age 14 on That ‘70s Show. She’s currently starring in A Bad Moms Christmas, which opens today, but from everything we’ve read, she definitely does not seem like a bad mom.
1. She and husband Ashton Kutcher literally lived out their movies about friends with benefits (she starred in Friends with Benefits with Justin Timberlake, he starred in No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman): They thought they could keep things “casual” and it would be totally fine. Clearly, they didn’t take to heart the lessons of their own films.
2. Funny enough, Natalie Portman, according to Mila, is “the one person in the world that both Ashton and I have kissed.” 😘😘
3. Mila and Natalie starred together in Black Swan, the 2010 psychological horror film where they both played ballerinas, but Mila said she is a terrible dancer: “I have two left feet. I have no rhythm.” After finishing the movie she told W Magazine, “I will never dance again. It was the hardest thing I’ve done.”
4. She has two kids with Ashton Kutcher: daughter Wyatt Isabelle,3, and son Dmitri Portwood,11 months. She speaks Russian to her children; she plans on raising them bilingual (and apparently Ashton is learning too!).
5. Before Ashton, she dated Macaulay Culkin (from “Home Alone”) for eight years and while you may have known this, I just learned this fact and I am shocked.
6. She’s accepted all types of holiday traditions: “My family’s big on any excuse to get the family together and get drunk. Whether it’s Easter, which we’ve now all accepted into our Jewish household, or Christmas, it doesn’t matter. It’s all family time, but having kids, we’re building up our own little versions of tradition.”
7. Mila also loves wine, telling Harper’s Bazaar, “My glass of wine and I are besties.” She gives her daughter wine for Shabbat. Mila is definitely a #COOLMOM #🍷
8. She believes in the power of a library card, telling ET Online, “We have a public library card everywhere we go. When it is really hot outside, we go to the library and read books.”
9. Her advice to politicians, circa summer 2016: “I think all presidents should have teenage girls before they become presidents. If you can handle those hormones, you can handle anything.”
10. Mila was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and was only 7 when her family left the Soviet Union. Mila remembers, “I was told we were moving down the street.” They came to the U.S. on a religious refugee visa; her mother was a physics teacher and her father was an engineer.
11. She had no clue about the anti-Semitism her parents faced, explaining to Glamour, “My parents went through hell and back. They came to America with suitcases and a family of seven and $250, and that’s it.”
12. She only started acting classes to learn English, telling Obsessed With Film, “I was new to America so my English wasn’t great at that time so [my parents] were like ‘you know what? We’ll send you to a little class where you can make friends and learn English.”
13. She now dreams in English, telling a Reddit AMA in 2015, “when I learned to speak English fluently, my dreams changed to English.”
14. Her dad is the funniest person she knows, because, “he has such a dry sense of humor. He’d say something funny and then be like, ‘Kiddo, now’s the part where you laugh.’”
15. According to multiple sources, Mila has heterochromia (one brown eye and one blue eye, or one brown eye and one green eye?) but we think close-ups of her look like her eyes are the same color?! Please weigh in!! What is confirmed by Mila herself is that she was blind in one eye for many years and had surgery in 2010 to fix this.
16. Out of all the superheroes, Mila would like to play Batman. Sidenote: We would take Mila Kunis over Ben Affleck ANY DAY.
17. She is high-key a Bachelor fan. She watches it to relax, even though she hates to admit it, writing in a Reddit AMA in 2015, “it’s so addictive. I mean, it’s unbelievably addicting. In all 15 seasons or so they’ve done this, I’ve never sat down to watch it. But now – oh my god, these women are crazy!” But she and Ashton did go on an episode of Rachel Lindsay’s season.
Ready to help @TheRachLindsay make some hard decisions on tonight’s episode of #TheBachelorette at 8/7c on ABC pic.twitter.com/pEAqpvXC5J
— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) May 29, 2017
18. Up next for Mila is a film we cannot wait to see: The Spy Who Dumped Me, in which she co-stars with Kate McKinnon.
Bonus: You must watch this 13-year-old Mila Kunis. No questions, just watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxnyIB67zg
Mila, if you want to cover the next season of the Bachelor as a correspondent for Alma, just let us know.
Header image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore