Mila Kunis Wasn't The Same After Her 'Awful' Black Swan Diet

Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" made audiences see actor Mila Kunis in a different light. At the time, she was most recognized for her role as Jackie Burkhart on "That '70s Show," which showed her comedic chops more than her acting chops. But in "Black Swan," where she starred opposite Natalie Portman, she got to showcase a brand new side of her.

Oddly enough, she had nary an idea why she even got the part. "I don't know how or why I got hired. I never really asked. I didn't want him to second-guess himself," she admitted to Collider. "I just went with it and said, 'All right, if you trust me, I'm game.' That's all it was. It was an amazing opportunity, which I don't regret and never want to question. I thank Darren every day for it." But Kunis wasn't prepared for how strenuous training would be. She didn't anticipate that she'd have to quite literally alter her whole anatomy for her role as a ballerina. "[It's] the most physically strenuous thing I've ever done in my whole life," she told Coming Soon. "I didn't realize what you had to put your body through in order to look like a ballerina, walk like a ballerina... It's the craziest thing I've ever done in my life."

Ballerina Alexandra Blacker, her trainer, told Backstage that aside from ballet training, Kunis also had to do all sorts of exercises, including Pilates, cycling, and fitness cross-training. "She had to lose a lot of weight—not that she wasn't slender to begin with," Blacker said. "But for the movie, she had to be waif thin." And Kunis did. But her body was never the same again.

Mila Kunis barely had any days off when she was preparing for the film. Speaking with the Daily Mail, she dished that she had to drop 20 pounds to look the part. "I trained four hours a day, seven days a week, for seven months. I had one day off on my birthday and half a day off for the Emmys and the Golden Globes..." she detailed. "Aesthetically, I had to look like a ballerina and hold myself like one. By the end, I was 95 [pounds]. All you saw was bone. It looked disgusting, but in photographs and on film it looked amazing. It took me five months to lose the weight."

She assured, though, that she didn't resort to drastic measures to shed the pounds. It was the result of her hard work. "I didn't starve myself. I did do it in the healthiest way possible. I don't recommend anybody ever doing it," she told Howard Stern, noting that her routine was starkly different from what she had when she was younger, with a diet of under 1,200 calories coupled with cigarette smoking.

While Kunis did gain her normal weight back, she admitted to Harper's Bazaar that her body was never the same again. "My shape is different. When I got down to 95 pounds, I was muscles, like a little brick house, but skin and bones. When I gained it back, it went to completely different areas." And it wasn't even in areas where she'd hoped the fat would go. "All the weight that left my chest went to my side hip, my stomach," she added.

In the same Harper's Bazaar interview, Mila Kunis was asked if she would ever be willing to drop weight again for another role, and surprisingly, she admitted she would — with reservations, of course. "I'm not going to say I'd look forward to it, but if an offer came along, I'd do it," she said.

That offer came years later in "Good Four Days," where she starred alongside Glenn Close and had to play a drug addict. In an interview with The Wrap, the actor dished that to look the part, she had to really cut back, and she ended up returning to roughly the same as her "Black Swan" weight. "I was healthy in regards to the way I did it but as far as a lifestyle choice, I was like, 'Oh this is rough,'" she divulged. "But it only had to be for a minute. You have to unfortunately look a certain way to look like a heroin addict so I think I did it over four months. I exercised and dieted. I felt very strong... but I was thin."

And the reason why she was able to do all this? Kunis owes it all to her grit. "I don't think I ever fully realized what a human body is capable of doing. But I think I was also, in a beautiful way, incredibly naïve," she told Glamour (via Cosmopolitan). "I believed I could do anything. I never for one moment thought that I couldn't do it. I believe in hard work. In self-drive and self-worth."