In a culture that urges women to lean in, insisting they can have it all while providing scant resources to manifest that promise, Mila Kunis is the first to admit she's had to make sacrifices. But at 32, Kunis has now mastered the balancing act that is motherhood and professional mobility.
"I got — knock on wood — very lucky," the actress, who is expecting her second child with husband Ashton Kutcher, says in the August issue of Glamour. "But I did choose. I took a chunk of time off. If it were up to (Ashton), we would have had kids much sooner. But I had contracts for films I had to do. I was like, 'Let me finish this last thing, Jupiter Ascending, and we’re a go. I’m going to take a solid break from acting.' And let me tell you, when I would get a call with an offer, I wouldn’t even flinch. I was like, 'No, I’m pregnant. No, I have a baby.' I wasn’t ready to go back. I was so happy saying no, that I knew it was the right decision."
Addressing whether there was ever a part of her that feared being shut out of opportunities, Kunis replies, "I was like, 'Whatever will happen will happen.' As an actor, you travel so much. It isn’t great for a marriage. In a marriage, you and your partner come first. And unless you and your partner are happy, that kid’s never going to be happy."
That epiphany was proceeded by Kunis' decision to launch her own production company, Orchard Farm Productions. But while Kunis is now calling the shots on the business side, she's also ventured back to the other side of the camera, starring in the summer blockbuster, Bad Moms (out July 29). The film is a sharp-toothed comedy that tears into "women's desire to be perfect," a compulsion Kunis is all too familiar with.
"Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona—to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves," Kunis says before later joking, "Have a baby, and you realize: The second you think you got (expletive) figured out, you don’t."
Because children are simply "(expletive) crazy."
"Like, at the park," Kunis explains, "certain jungle gyms have an opening for older kids to jump out of. (My daughter is) 19 months; she can’t jump. She just walks off it as if she’s on a pirate ship. Another important thing to learn is that kids have a personality that has nothing to do with you. I have a really sweet daughter. She wants to hug all the other kids. I didn’t teach her to be sweet. It has nothing to do with me. I’ve realized you can control only so much."
But it's an adventure Kunis seems happy to take with Kutcher.
"There’s nothing we don’t know about each other because we’ve known each other for so long: the ugly, the bad, the good," she says. "It truly is being married to your best friend. That’s a cliché; it’s cheesy. But it’s true."
