Mila Kunis Gets Honest About Longtime ‘That ’70s Show’ Rumor

Mila Kunis is coming clean. The That ’70s Show alum achieved fame from her involvement with the popular show, but her success comes with an asterisk: it’s a long-held belief that Kunis lied about her age to audition for the show. The Luckiest Girl Alive actress spoke about the topic in a recent Vanity Fair video retrospective about her career. “There’s a rumor going around that I may or may not have lied about my age for That ’70s Show. I’d like to make it very clear now: I did lie. Okay? I did,” she revealed. “However, by the time I went to what was then, like, producers, network call, you have to sign a contract before you get the job. And in my contract, I had to put an asterisk and be like, ‘Studio teacher.’ And they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, P.S. I’m 14.’”

Interestingly, Kunis herself spread this true non-rumor. “Legally, I was 14,” she told Jay Leno of her audition in 2012. “I told them I was gonna be 18, which … is not technically a lie, ’cause at one point, given all things went right, I was gonna be 18.” Kunis told Vanity Fair, “But at that point, if you talked to [series creators] Bonnie and Terry Turner, they were so sweet, they were like, ‘Well, we loved you at that point, so what did we care?’ It was in the heyday of like, older kids playing younger kids, and I was actually of the age of the character.”

“I wasn’t intimidated. I had a solid ego, man, I thought I was so cool. So it must have been intimidating, is what I should say. But I don’t know if it was intimidating in the sense of like, I didn’t know who I was or lost sense of myself, but I must have been like, ‘Wow, these kids are all so cool and they’re so much older than I am and they’re so much cooler than I am,’” she adds. “I had the greatest experience on ’70s. 100% I was embraced, 100% I was never treated as like, lesser than, and if I did by one of the cast members, another cast member would stand up for it. So, you know, we were all trying to figure ourselves out. We were all young.”

Kunis also became the latest celebrity to weigh in on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at this year’s Academy Awards. In a new cover story, the star told C Magazine that she was “shocked” at the number of crowd members who stood up for him following the altercation. “The idea of leading by example only makes sense when you actually have someone to lead. We have our tiny little tribe here at home, and never once do I want to tell them to do something if I’m not willing to do it myself. “Not standing up, to me, was a no-brainer, but what was shocking to me was how many people did stand up,” said Kunis. “I thought, ‘Wow, what a time we’re living in that rather than do what’s right, people focus on doing what looks good.’ It’s insane to me.”