CROSS-POSTED TO LBN! Mila Kunis is named "GQ's Knockout of the Year." USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

http://www.gq.com/moty/2011/mila-kunis-gq-men-of-the-year-issue



BY MICHAEL IDOV
PHOTOGRAPH BY TERRY RICHARDSON

Twelve hours before I'm scheduled to meet Mila Kunis, I lose my voice. I don't mean I can't nail the free in "The Star-Spangled Banner." I mean the only sound my throat is capable of delivering is a deeply creepy rasp best suited to the phrase get in my van.

It's a predicament straight out of a mediocre sitcom, which is appropriate. Like everyone else, I first laid eyes on Kunis in the weirdly resilient That '70s Show. But it wasn't until this year's anti-rom-com Friends with Benefits (written for Kunis and Justin Timberlake) that we were introduced to fully formed Star Mila: sardonic, brassy, effortlessly real, the girl we couldn't get out of our heads since Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The girl I am now about to present with my impression of a Tuvan throat singer.

Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, Kunis meets me in the lobby of her apartment building in suburban Detroit, where she is shooting Oz: The Great and Powerful, Sam Raimi's massive prequel to The Wizard of Oz. (She's a witch.) It takes one screeched "Hi!" for the interview agenda to go out the window. "Oh, I feel so bad! You're so siiick!" she coos. "Let's get you better." She takes me to a nearby Japanese restaurant for miso soup; it's closed, but they open for Kunis, a weekly customer. "Cough away," she instructs me over crab hand rolls. "Don't hold it in! You've got to let it out! Don't worry about me. I'll just take some vitamins later." I have unwittingly stumbled upon the one side of Kunis that hasn't shown up in movies yet: the Jewish mother.

Milena Markovna Kunis was born in Chernovtsy, in the then USSR, now Ukraine, in 1983. In Soviet context, Chernovtsy was a kind of notorious backwater. "It wasn't, like, a full-on village," Kunis protests with a giggle. "We had a movie theater. Streets were paved. We had a normal school." She enjoyed those fine amenities until second grade, when her parents moved the family to L.A., picking their new home for purely practical reasons: They had relatives there. Kunis fell into acting just as pragmatically: "My English was a little janky. I didn't have very many friends. And there was this place advertised on the radio as a place for kids to meet other kids—an acting class. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter. They said, 'Great, that takes up our Saturday.' "