The ‘Benefits' of Mila Kunis

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Mila Kunis did not want to do a romantic comedy. After asserting herself as a world-class scene stealer in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” one of the few romantic comedies to go against formula, Kunis said she was inundated with offers for boilerplate boy-girl cutesiness.

Nothing about Kunis' post-“Marshall” career, which includes acclaimed performances in “Black Swan,” “Extract” and “The Book of Eli,” suggested she should play a woman whose self-worth is tied to a man's approval, and yet the scripts kept coming. So, in order to do “Friends With Benefits,” a sex-without-commitment comedy co-starring Justin Timberlake, something would have to change.

Gluck, who directed 2010's surprise hit “Easy A” with Emma Stone, is known for rapid-fire jokes and capturing the chemistry between actors, and to his mind, the script by Keith Merryman and David A. Newman had a good structure. All it needed was a good punch-up, and he wanted to involve Kunis and Timberlake in the process.

“I got Justin and Mila attached with the caveat that we would rewrite and we would do everything together,” Gluck said.

“So, I met with Will, and we had dinner with Justin, and we talked about his plan,” Kunis said. “The reason I eventually wanted to do this was because I was given a voice and allowed to do what I thought was funny. It seemed like the right way to do a comedy, so I was excited to be part of that process.”

In “Friends With Benefits,” Kunis plays Jamie, a New York City corporate headhunter who recruits new media wunderkind Dylan (Timberlake) to become the online editor at GQ. Dylan relocates from Los Angeles to New York City, where he and Jamie continue their friendship and, considering their recent romantic disasters, decide that sex without obligation might be their best option. Without the baggage associated with romantic entanglement, Jamie and Dylan get to know each other as friends — possibly in a deeper way than they would if they were romantically involved.

Although she first found the spotlight as Jackie Burkhart on television's “That '70s Show” and for her voice work as Meg Griffin on “Family Guy,” the post-“Sarah Marshall” phase of Kunis' career brought with it status as an A-list sex symbol and gossip-blog object. Some of the attention is completely appreciated, such as when Kunis accepted a YouTube invitation to attend the Marine Corps Ball in Greenville, N.C., with Sgt. Scott Moore, who is stationed in Afghanistan.

But in the current cover story for the Los Angeles-based style magazine L.A. Confidential, Kunis said much of the attention she receives for just walking out in public creates undue pressure, especially after the success of “Black Swan.”

“I've never dealt with it on a level like in the last few months,” she told the magazine. “It makes you become a hermit, because normal activities — like picking up laundry or sneezing — suddenly (make you) self-conscious. I love the Internet, but it's taken away all sense of illusion. If you leave the house you're screwed, and if you don't leave you're screwed.”

“From the beginning, I saw this as a ‘two-hander' and not as a romantic comedy — I saw it as two people doing something that is funny,” Kunis said. “That is not to discredit the actors in them (traditional rom-coms), but they have boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy breaks up with girl and, at the end, boy realizes he loves girl. There is very little substance, and that story has been told and will be told forever.

“It's not to say our story is different, but he (director Gluck) went about it differently. The way we get from point A to point Z is a little more fun and more modern and a little more creative. I never wanted to play a victim in a film, and I never wanted to play the girl that needed the guy, so I thought this was the right vehicle for that.”

Travel and accommodations provided by Screen Gems.