Melissa Hebeler/E! IllustrationWho wouldn't buy a ticket to this movie?
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, who are celebrating their second wedding anniversary this week, have been candid about how their romance finally got off the ground: they were FWBs!
Their attempt at being casual about it, the both of them only recent single and sure that neither was ready for a relationship, obviously failed miserably. But the really notable thing about their relationship's earliest days is the fact that life was truly reflecting art for the handsome pair.
"We, oddly, both did a movie called—I did Friends With Benefits, he did a movie called No Strings Attached," Kunis recalled to Howard Stern in 2016. "If we just paid attention to these movies, we should know that s--t like this does not work out in real life. Well, we clearly didn't pay attention. We shook hands, we're like, 'Let's just have fun!' I mean, literally we lived out our movies. We literally just had a very open conversation."
Figuring they could both work with the situation directly in front of them, "We both were in agreement, 'Yeah, this is just fun. Just fun.' Shook hands on it. Just fun."
"Three months later," Kunis admitted, "I was like, "This isn't fun anymore!"
"We legitimately lived out our movies, which was virtually the same movie," Kutcher retold the story recently, also on The Howard Stern Show.
And so they got their happy ending. But the playing out of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits in their actual lives isn't the only time Ashton and Mila have ended up acting out a scene from a romantic comedy. In fact, rom-com plot points have been factoring into their relationship for years, starting two decades ago back when they were just a couple of teenage co-stars.
Actually, Kunis was only 14...
So even though they played a couple from the beginning on That '70s Show, the five-year age gap between them was a mile wide when they first met.
Mila even had her first kiss, ever, with Ashton on the show...
...but at the end of the day he felt more like a big brother.
And so the longtime-time co-stars, both of whom were soon involved in serious relationships with other people, were just friends.
Kunis started dating Macaulay Culkin in 2002 and they were together for nine years. Kutcher dated TKTK and Brittany Murphy, then married Demi Moore in 2005.
It was in 2011, newly single and "having the best time ever," that Kunis spied Kutcher at an awards show—and happened to notice what a fine specimen he had turned out to be.
"Like, I think he for the first time ever took my breath away...I was like, "F--k, he's good looking," she told Stern.
Having stayed in touch even through their respective relationships (That '70s Show lasted until 2006 in the meantime), Kutcher had the bright idea to set Kunis up with a non-famous yet apparently very successful friend of his. So, he invited her to a party at his place one night to meet his buddy, and she brought a girlfriend along, "just in case" it all went wrong.
Well, Kutcher's friend never showed, and as he shared with Stern, Kunis had recently quit smoking and since he still smoked at the time, she took the opportunity to soak up his second-hand smoke throughout the evening.
As the conversation deepened and they kept getting closer throughout the night...a kiss was fairly inevitable.
And so they spent their first evening together—the first time, Mila said, that she'd ever stayed over the whole night with a non-boyfriend.
Yet they both agreed that they needed to remain single, and so they embarked on their arrangement. Mila didn't even plan on getting married any time, much less to him.
"It was super private for a very long time," Mila recalled.
But lo and behold...
"It ended up being just having fun to genuinely wanting [more] when I realized I was nervous [about losing him to someone else], was when I spoke to him," Kunis remembered. "I was like..."
"'I don't like this anymore.'"
Luckily, the feeling was mutual.
So, after barely a year of being single and just a few months after they embarked on their experiment, they went public as a real-deal couple.
A few things had to be figured out, of course. Ashton needed a divorce from Demi, for one, so he filed in December 2012.
But then it was fairly full speed ahead...
They were engaged by February 2014 and welcomed daughter Wyatt that September. "We all get movie star crushes," Kunis gushed to Elle. "I'm marrying mine."
They tied the knot over the July 4 weekend in 2015 and son Dimitri was born this past December.
"People will fill in the blanks however they want," Ashton told Elle in 2012, when he was in the early stages of his committed and ultimately more beneficial relationship with Mila.
"You know, I've learned the hard way how valuable privacy is," he added. "And I've learned that there are a lot of things in your life that really benefit from being private. And relationships are one of them. And I am going to do everything in my power to have this relationship be private."
He couldn't help that their life had become a rom-com, and they were just acting in it. A little improvisation was required, but otherwise, you can't argue with a script that works.
And almost 20 years after they first met, these two have more than proved that they were meant to be all along.
Or as Mila put it last year, "If we just paid attention to these movies, we should know s--t like this does not work out in real life!"