Mila Kunis Doesn't Know Who I Am
Nor Should She, Even Though I Once Brandished a Knife Around Her
I was sitting in my car, parked outside Michael Keaton’s house, thinking, This is a bad idea.
Because meeting people you’ve admired since you were a teenager doesn’t usually go well due to all that projecting, and this one was particularly fraught. Because Keaton is in an unfair spot. I admire him for two competing traits: He’s cool and he cares. He’s glib and passionate, a ying-yang of dismissiveness and mania, Jack Nicholson crossed with Jim Carrey. Too much intensity, and he’s not cool. Too much cool, and he’s not substantive. Poor bastard. Poor me.
I was writing about him for last weekend’s cover of the Financial Times How To Spend it Magazine:
So I sat in my parked car for a while, calculating the slim odds of this going well. When he was profiled by Esquire ten years ago, he had his publicist give the reporter a pre-interview assignment of films to watch, articles to read, podcasts to listen to, and people to talk to about him. This will bum me out, because while Keaton should want to do the best interview possible, he should also not care what I write about him.
I had called my friend Daniel Kellison, a TV producer who interviewed him for Grantland years ago, to get advice. He assured me it was going to be fine. I was not assured.
It was a good sign that he invited me to his house, which is not a move of someone who cares. George Clooney told me that the reason he accepted an invitation to be interviewed at my house for a Time magazine cover was because he got to be a guest, and I would worry about being judged for my house, my cleanliness, my food.
I pressed the button on the gate of the house. An assistant came to get me. Which was bad sign for not caring. But then Keaton emerges to greet me in a blue pocket T-shirt, a baseball cap, gray sweatpants, and a knee brace – a Not Caring Guy Halloween costume. And as his smart, funny assistant leads me to the kitchen, I realize she’s his long-time girlfriend.
We sat on his porch for a few hours, eating a breakfast he had bought for us, and he somehow, despite the odds, exceeded expectations. He was a great conversationalist, funny and honest, drawing out my thoughts even as I tried to stick to his. Afterwards, he got my cell from his publicist and started texting me. At first, I ignored him because the text read:
Good morningIt's MK
Thought you'd like to go over a couple things
I'm thorough. Ha!
Enjoyed the hang btw
Which seemed like something a scammer would definitely write. “MK?” I definitely don’t know an “MK.” I’d never given my cell number to anyone with those initials. And “Thought you’d like to go over a couple of things” sounded very fake, especially since, after two hours on his porch, I didn’t think I needed to go over anything.
But it was him. And he called and texted some more, and said he wants to hang out some time. And I believe him. Which makes me an absolute idiot.
In addition to the new Beetlejuice sequel, Keaton also stars in an indie movie coming out this fall called Goodrich, in which Mila Kunis plays his daughter. So I asked the publicist of Goodrich to set up a phone interview with Kunis so I could get some quotes from her about Keaton. She would tell me that Keaton had driven a Good Humor ice cream truck in his twenties, which would get cut by my editors. Even though I texted MK and got him to tell me how bad he was at it.
“I gave most of it away. I would forget that – there was a little bit of weed involved – that you’d say, “Give me a bunch of the strawberry crumble cone’ and you’d get your dry ice and you keep it in your truck overnight. I should have been more attuned to the ice part. I’d pull into a neighborhood and open the back of the truck – it was like driving around an old ice box – and it would just be oozing with artificial strawberry fake thing, and I’d say, ‘Okay dude, just take it.” And if a kid didn’t have enough money I’d say, “Just take it.”
Before we got to the ice cream man stuff, I started the call by reminding Mila Kunis that we met. And not just met: But met in the most important way: On television. I had been on Conan O’Brien’s TBS talk show to promote my first book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. As a huge fan of late-night television as a kid, I had spent decades planning what I would do if I were on one of those shows where previous guests stay on the couch with you. Like all great talk show guests, I would definitely involve them in my conversation with the host. As a professional interviewer - and one whose lack of fame disappointed the audience - I would excel at this.
I felt lucky to get Mila Kunis next to me. I’d interviewed her before, and she was funny and straightforward and easy to talk to. So a few minutes in, I turned away from Conan and toward her and got her to tell a story about Suzanne Somers rubbing hormones on her “vaginal area.” A few minutes later, after I showed Conan how to flick a switchblade open, I asked her if she was turned on. “Oh yes, I was turned on,” she replied.
A smart person would stop trying to relive these minutes with a person who did not remember them. I am not a smart person. I think she thought I was bringing this up to promote my book, only this time to an audience of one. She promised to read my book, which I assure her was not at all what I wanted. What I didn’t say was I wanted Mila Kunis to remember our relationship.
Which makes me an absolute idiot.
Humans are insanely status conscious. My best story of the entire day is sometimes, “I saw Ron Perlman at the grocery store.” That’s not a story. That’s not even as interesting as whatever I did at the grocery store. Worse, I’ve never even seen anything Ron Perlman has been in.
To Mila Kunis, appearing on Conan O’Brien was like going to the grocery store. And I was another weird guy who awkwardly flirted with her. Sure, it was with a knife, which I thought might be memorable, though, in retrospect, not memorable in the positive way I had assumed at that pre MeToo time.
I don’t like the way my body feels when I’m around higher status people. And I don’t like being around lower status people. So I can either become a more enlightened person or try to fix my career.
I think we both know what’s more likely. I were you, I wouldn’t pay for the annual version of the subscription to this column.
That was worth paying for!
Thank you! I so needed this today! By the way; you’re probably too good for her anyways; but the knife pull…should have won her over.