Mila Kunis at the premiere of Friends With Benefits in New York. (Reuters)

New York, July 19: When Marine Sgt. Scott Moore famously asked Mila Kunis to a formal dance via YouTube, he likely had no idea that he would be the first to extend such a chivalrous invitation to the red-hot actress.

“I’ve never been asked out on a date,” says Kunis, who plans to attend the Marine Corps Ball with Moore in November. “A real date, like a dinner and a movie? No. And I respect the guy for having big enough cojones to do it.”

Watching Kunis, 27, discuss her latest film, the romantic comedy Friends With Benefits, in a Midtown restaurant, one is inclined to agree. The woman who came into public consciousness as the oft-irritating teen Jackie Burkhart on That ‘70s Show has evolved into a forbiddingly goddess-like creature.

Wearing a speckled white sundress, gold-and-turquoise hoop earrings framing her enormous hazel eyes, she speaks animatedly but with the relaxed poise of someone who has never had to strain to command attention.

Yet there is an accessible quality to Kunis, whose career trajectory and personal life hardly evoke Hollywood it-girl clichés. After honing her comedic chops on a pair of sitcoms — she also voices the insecure, affection-starved Meg Griffin on the animated Family Guy — the actress, by her own admission, “auditioned for everything, just to prove that everyone who assumed I could only do TV was wrong”.

Kunis landed female leads in male-dominated fare such as the action flick Max Payne and the Denzel Washington vehicle The Book of Eli. But her most high-profile film roles, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the best picture Oscar-nominated Black Swan, found her cast as foils and rivals to characters played by then-bigger names

In Benefits, Kunis is squarely the leading lady and very much on equal footing with her male co-star, Justin Timberlake. She plays Jamie, a Manhattan headhunter who lands Timberlake’s Dylan, founder of a Los Angeles-based tastemaker blog, a plum job as art director of GQ. After the two meet at an airport, a camaraderie develops, along with a clear if unspoken chemical spark.

Determined not to let stereotypical relationship issues sabotage their platonic bond, Jamie and Dylan resolve to enjoy casual sex while remaining just buddies. What follows is a sweetly bawdy updating of classic rom-com trials and themes, in which the genders emerge as separate but plainly equal.

“It took me five years after (shooting) Sarah Marshall to venture back into the romantic-comedy world,” says Kunis, who identifies that 2008 movie as a “turning point” in proving her diversity to audiences.

“Every script was the same. What attracted me to (Jamie) is that I think she stays true to what a twentysomething-year-old is nowadays — as opposed to today’s romantic-comedy version of that, which is more fairy tale-based, with the woman a little ditzier. Jamie’s smart and honest and grows as a person; it’s less about the man here than about how these two characters grow together.”

Benefits director Will Gluck also promised Kunis, he says, “that I wouldn’t make the movie unless her voice came through”. Kunis notes that the script “was originally PG-13, but we wanted to make it R-rated, make it a little more modern. We sat around and improv(is)ed scenes for close to two months, so I had more input into this character than I’ve ever had before.”

Timberlake, who signed on before Kunis, says Benefits benefited as a result. “Will and I wanted this to be an honest two-hander, and we needed someone who could play what’s real and who also had a very quick wit. Mila is that girl. She’s ridiculously beautiful, and at the same time she comes across as someone who can hang with the guys, make lowbrow jokes. You can throw anything at her and she'll roll with it.”

Forced to be funny

Some of that affinity may date back to Kunis’s youth. “I never thought of myself as funny, but I grew up in a very sarcastic household,” she says. “My dad is very funny, very dry. So since I was little, I’ve learned to roll with the punches — and punch back a little bit.”

Kunis still lives just 10 minutes away from her parents, who fled Ukraine as the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991 to settle in West Hollywood. “My parents told me that we were moving across the street, because it wasn’t OK to leave and they didn’t want me to say anything to anyone,” Kunis says. “Then we just got on a train one day, went to Moscow and got on a plane to America.”

Though she entered second grade in the US without understanding a word of English, Kunis performed well at school and maintained, she insists, “a very normal life”, even after she began acting at 9. “I went to public school in Los Angeles, had friends at school who weren’t in the industry. I still do. My best friends Julie and Kat and I grew up together; Julie's a teacher at LA High and Kat is a dentist.”