Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher kissed for the first time on a sitcom set, playing a couple. They did not become one for years. People put the pair in its roundup of celebrity couples who started off as costars before dating years later. The gap between that first kiss and the real thing is what makes their story stand out.
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher First Met on ‘That ’70s Show’
Fox’s That ’70s Show put them together. Kunis and Kutcher played boyfriend and girlfriend on the beloved sitcom, and according to The Knot, they shared their first kiss as costars while filming it.
Nothing came of it then.
Plenty of Hollywood couples turn a scripted romance into a real one while the cameras are still rolling. Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer met on the set of True Blood, took their characters’ romance off screen, and married in 2010. Alexis Bledel and Vincent Kartheiser met on Mad Men in 2011, when she was cast as his character’s love interest. The Knot reported it was not long before they were a couple in real life. They wed in June 2014 in Ojai, California.
Kunis and Kutcher did the opposite. They had the scenes, the kiss, the years of working side by side, and walked away as costars.
The Couple Reconnected Years Later at an Awards Show
An awards show changed it. The Knot reported that sparks did not fly until the two crossed paths again at one, long after the sitcom, and that they started dating soon after.
Timing does a lot of quiet work in a relationship. Two people can be the same two people and still be wrong for each other at one point in their lives and right at another. On that set, Kunis and Kutcher were coworkers with a script telling them to fall for each other. At the awards show, nobody was telling them anything. They already knew each other well, and that history came with them.
Familiarity is underrated as a starting point. Most first dates are spent figuring out who the other person is. These two had already watched each other at work for years, through long days and bad takes, before either one decided it meant something.
Would you date someone you first met as a costar or coworker?
From Sitcom Couple to Marriage
July 2014 brought the wedding. Mila Kunis married Ashton Kutcher that month. Their second child arrived in November 2016.
Their path looks nothing like the costar couples who clicked right away. Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman met acting in a small play in Los Angeles, have been married since 2003, and later played a divorced couple on Parks and Recreation. Steve and Nancy Carell married in 1995, years before their characters briefly dated on The Office. For those pairs, the screen romance came after the real one, or alongside it.
Mila Kunis got the screen romance first, by a long way. Her fake relationship ended when the show did. Her real one started at an awards show, with someone she had already kissed on camera, and turned into a marriage and two kids.
Neither has laid out exactly what changed between the set and that awards show night.
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher: Their Story So Far
1998: <cite index="1-3">The two met in 1998 when they began filming hit comedy That '70s Show together.</cite>
2012: <cite index="2-10">Both newly single, they reconnected at the 69th Golden Globe Awards on January 15, 2012</cite>, and <cite index="1-14">they moved in together in April 2012.</cite>
2014: <cite index="8-13">In February 2014, they got engaged and in October, they welcomed a daughter Wyatt Isabelle.</cite>
July 2015: <cite index="4-9">They married on the Fourth of July weekend in a small, private ceremony</cite>, and <cite index="3-9">their son Dimitri was born in November 2016.</cite>
Read the full story: Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher’s relationship timeline.
