Mila Kunis landed the role of Jackie Burkhart when she was only 14 years old.
It's about time that Mila Kunis addresses claims that she allegedly lied about her age when auditioning for That '70s Show.
At the time the sitcom began production, the casting directors were reportedly looking for adult actors, meaning that Kunis, who was 14 at the time, was likely too young for the role—but she didn't let that stop her.
"There's a rumor going around that I may or may not have lied about my age for That '70s Show," the actress, now 39, stated in a conversation with Vanity Fair.
"I'd like to make it very clear now: I did lie. Okay? I did,"
she candidly admitted, before finally cluing viewers into the real story
behind her little fib.
Kunis explained that by the time she was
given a contract to sign before landing the job, noting, "In my contract I
had to put and asterisk and be like 'studio teacher' and they were like
'What do you mean?' And I was like, 'Oh P.S. I'm 14.'"
But it
ended up being water under the bridge at that point, as the show's creators
Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, decided they wanted Kunis for the role
despite her age.
"They were so sweet. They were like 'Well we
loved you at that point, so what did we care,'" Kunis recalled
"It was in the heyday of like older kids playing younger kids
and I was actually of the age of the character," the Bad Moms star explained
of her role as Jackie Burkhart on the hit series.
Kunis was years younger than the rest of her fellow co-costars,
including Laura Prepon, Wilmer Valderrama, Topher Grace and her current
husband, Ashton Kutcher, among others, but she never let age get in the way
of her performance.
"I wasn't intimated. I had a solid ego," she
told the publication. "Man, I thought it 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 also claimed that the rest of the cast embraced her "one
hundred percent," regardless of her age. "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."
Kunis also doesn't think her age mattered much
at the time, telling the outlet, "We were all trying to figure
ourselves out. We were all young."
Kunis is expected to return
to her That '70s Show character in the new reboot series, That '90s Show,
where she will play Jackie as an adult this time around.
