Life imitated art for Mila Kunis and husband Ashton Kutcher.
On Monday, the 34-year-old actress shared how she fell for her 40-year-old former co-star on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast — and the story will sound strikingly familiar to fans of both actors.
The future Mr. and Mrs. Kutch met on the set of “That ’70s Show” in 1998, when Kunis was only 14. The two played a steamy, make-out-happy couple, but their real-life relationship was a bit more platonic.
“Yep, in the show [we kissed], with no feelings whatsoever,” Kunis told Maron. “It’s the weirdest story that nobody believes, but it’s the God’s honest truth. There was nothing there, and it was like ... whatever.”
It’s a lost love connection that Kunis said she regrets, even though she and Kutcher have been married three years and have two kids.
“We could have spent 20 years together,” she said.
But in retrospect, Kunis said, she doesn’t think the two were ready for each other yet.
“We would have never been together if we didn’t both go through what we went through in order to be the people that we were when we reconnected,” she said.
For Kunis, this meant dating actor Macaulay Culkin for eight years. Kutcher famously married actress Demi Moore in 2005, and they divorced in 2013.
Yet even after these long-term relationships, they never imagined they would be together.
That was until one fateful night.
“We were at an awards show, and I was backstage,” she recalled. “I was, like, looking around, and there was like a really beautiful man from the back. I was like, ‘What a very nice stature of a gentleman.’ I was literally, like, ‘Ooh, he’s kind of hot.’ I was single. And then he turned around, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God! It’s Kutch!’ I thought it was the weirdest thing that I was checking this guy out, and it was somebody I’d known forever.”
The two quickly went from friends to friends with benefits.
“We never dated,” Kunis continued. “Let me be clear, Ash and I hooked up. Literally, I did a movie called ‘Friends With Benefits.’ He did a movie that was very similar, ‘No Strings Attached.’ We lived our movies out.”
Just like the characters both played, they soon began developing feelings for each other, which seemed to spook Kunis.
“I walked up to him, and I was like, ‘You know what? I actually care about you, and I don’t want to mess anything up, so I’m just going to walk away before it becomes too much,’” she recalled. “And he was like, ‘Got it.’”
But like any good romantic-comedy lead, Kutcher wasn’t going to let her go that easily.
“The next day, he showed up to my house, and he was like, ‘Move in with me,’” she said.
Kunis responded with a simple “OK.”
And the rest is history.