Mila Kunis addresses infamous rumor (that she started) about her age on That ’70s Show

What a fascinating legacy That ’70s Show has: still popular enough to warrant a reboot, controversial enough that no one in the reboot can mention why one of the main characters won’t be returning. One of the series’ fictional romances spawned the real-life Hollywood power couple of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis (sort of; they officially got together long after the show ended). And Kunis only got on the show in the first place after lying about her age, or so the story goes.

The Luckiest Girl Alive star addresses this in a new Vanity Fair video retrospective on her career. “There’s a rumor going around that I may or may not have lied about my age for That ’70s Show. I’d like to make it very clear now: I did lie. Okay? I did,” she admits. “However, by the time I went to what was then, like, producers, network call, you have to sign a contract before you get the job. And in my contract I had to put an asterisk, and be like, ‘Studio teacher.’ And they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, P.S. I’m 14.’”

As to who spread this infamously accurate rumor, by the way, look no further than Kunis herself. “Legally, I was 14,” she told Jay Leno back in 2012 of her ’70s audition. “I told them I was gonna be 18, which … is not technically a lie, ‘cause at one point, given all things went right, I was gonna be 18.”

“But at that point, if you talked to [series creators] Bonnie and Terry Turner, they were so sweet, they were like, ‘Well, we loved you at that point, so what did we care?’” Kunis now tells Vanity Fair. “It was in the heyday of like, older kids playing younger kids, and I was actually of the age of the character.”

“I wasn’t intimidated. I had a solid ego, man, I thought I was so cool. So it must have been intimidating, is what I should say. But I don’t know if it was intimidating in the sense of like, I didn’t know who I was or lost sense of myself, but I must have been like, ‘Wow, these kids are all so cool and they’re so much older than I am and they’re so much cooler than I am,’” she adds. “I had the greatest experience on ’70s. 100% I was embraced, 100% I was never treated as like, lesser than, and if I did by one of the cast members, another cast member would stand up for it. So, you know, we were all trying to figure ourselves out. We were all young.”