Last year, Mila Kunis famously calmed the nerves of a terrified BBC reporter during a junket interview for Oz: The Great and Powerful. It immediately went viral and helped solidify Kunis’ reputation as one of the coolest, most laid-back movie stars out there.
Now the actress has another viral interview on her hands – although this one is going viral for very different reasons.
“The interview starts going south from the first question, when I make the mistake of asking Mila Kunis how she’s feeling,”; begins Stephen Whitty of The New Jersey Star-Ledger. “She does not take this well.”;
Possibly interpreting Whitty’s question to be code for, “How is your pregnancy coming along?,”; Kunis responded, “I don’t talk about that for publication.”
Whitty then tried to gear that conversation toward Third Person, the indie film that Kunis is out promoting. This tactic also proved to be a bust.
When Whitty asked her if she was deliberately trying to transition away from big blockbusters toward lower budget indie fare (Third Person is her third indie movie of the year), Kunis replied, “Not really, because in the middle of all that I still did Oz: The Great and Powerful and I still did Jupiter Ascending, so that sort of destroys your assumption.”;
Then when Whitty asked her if she is trying to challenge herself by avoiding romantic comedies in favour of more serious, dramatic roles, Kunis was even more openly hostile. “I hate when people ask me this question,”; she said. “People have this misconception that comedy’s easy… I’m always looking for challenges and I find a lot of things to be challenging. It can be the director, the producer, a lot of things. I just want to work with people more talented than I am that I can learn from. […] It’s not like I go, “I’m going to do a tentpole movie now. You gravitate toward different things, different times.”;
Whitty also tried to ask Kunis about the experience of moving from the Ukraine to America at the age of seven, but this proved to be his least productive line of questioning yet. “I’ve talked about me moving to America in a hundred interviews. It’s the most mundane subject possible, it’s like everyone’s immigrant story,”; she explained. “I know what your next question is, so let’s just skip it. You’re going to ask me what I think about what’s going on now in Ukraine. Just because I lived there until I was seven doesn’t mean I identify with Ukraine.”;
At the end of the interview, Whitty attempted to apologize for upsetting her, but Kunis wasn’t having any of it. “No, no, it was a good interview!”; she insisted.
