Mila Kunis, who was born in Ukraine, said she used to tell people she was Russian.
The star of the series “Friends with Benefits” was born in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. In 1991, when she was seven years old, her family fled Soviet Ukraine for the United States.
In a new interview with Maria Shriver for Conversations Above the Noise, Kunis said: “People were like, ‘Oh, you’re so Eastern European.’ I’m like, “I’m so Los Angeles! What do you mean?’ Like, all my life I thought: “I am Los Angeles through and through.”
Kunis said that because she identified so strongly as an American, for a long time being Ukrainian seemed “out of place” to her, despite having close friends in the country and visiting with her husband, actor Ashton Kutcher.
She said that whenever people asked her where she was from, she replied that she was Russian for “many reasons.”
Kunis continued: “One of them was that when I came to the States and told people that I was from Ukraine, the first question they asked me was: “Where is Ukraine?” And then I had to explain Ukraine and its location on the map, and I was like, “Ugh, this is exhausting.”
She soon realized that if she said she was from Russia, people would understand what she meant. “I thought, ‘Great, I’ll just tell people from Russia,'” she said.
Kunis said everything changed for her when Russia invaded Ukraine last month. “It happens and I can’t express or explain what came over me, but all of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like part of my heart has just been ripped out,'” she said. “It was the strangest feeling.”
Maria Shriver and Mila Kunis
(YouTube)
She said that she would no longer tell people that she was from Russia. “Damn it, I’m from Ukraine!” she said.
Kunis and Kutcher have raised over £13m to help victims of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The couple announced last week that they would donate up to $3m (£2.5m) to humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees.
In a video message, Kunis stated that “there is no place in this world for this kind of unfair attack on humanity.”
Read The Independent’s latest news on the conflict here.
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