Mila Kunis Quietly Hid Her Partial Blindness for Years Before Finally Getting Surgery: ‘Nobody Knew’
Celebrities face an enormous amount of pressure and scrutiny from their adoring fans and critics alike. Many stars have trouble keeping their private lives to themselves because fans are paying such close attention to every moment of their lives. It can be interesting, then, to find out that a star has been keeping a major secret.
When it comes to medical conditions and disabilities, some stars are vocal about their conditions and even use that honesty as a platform for awareness and understanding that impacts others. Some, however, are much quieter.
Mila Kunis is among the latter group. The actor has long been known for her beauty, including her stunning eyes with their unique color combination, but for years she hid the fact that she was blind in one eye.
Mila Kunis began acting at a young age
Born in 1983, Kunis turned to acting before she was even a teenager. Her earliest role was a guest spot in Days of Our Lives in 1994, according to IMDb. She had other small guest roles on TV shows like Baywatch and Unhappily Ever After throughout the mid-to-late 1990s. In 1998, she landed that role that would serve as her big break and help define the trajectory of her career — and, as it turns out, her love life. Kunis was cast in the role of Jackie in That ’70s Show where she starred alongside future husband Ashton Kutcher. Soon after, Kunis also landed the role of voicing Meg Griffin in Family Guy, a part she still fulfills to this day.
From that point, Kunis’ career began to really take off. While That ’70s Show was still on the air, she branched into film work with comedies like Get Over It. It wasn’t until the series ended in 2006 that Kunis started steady appearances on the big screen. In 2007, she was in multiple films including Moving McAllister, and she continued the trend of appearing in multiple films a year for the next few years. These included hits like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Book of Eli.
Mila Kunis had an eye condition she kept hidden for years
While Kunis was rising in fame, she was hiding an eye condition that had serious consequences. As Nicki Swift reports, Kunis suffered from chronic iritis, an inflammation of the iris. As a result, Kunis was blind in one eye, but she kept it hidden from everyone. As MedPage Today reports, this condition is actually the cause of about 10% of all blindness cases, and it impacts about 280,000 people in the United States each year. It has been linked with autoimmune disorders, but some cases have no known medical correlation.
Interestingly, Kunis has another eye condition. This one is known as heterochromia, which is the term for having eyes of two different colors. As Medical News Today explains, heterochromia impacts less than 200,000 people in the United States, but Kunis is not the only celebrity who has the condition! Good Housekeeping has rounded up several celebrities sporting two differently shaded eyes, and they include Kiefer Sutherland, Bill Pullman, and Kate Bosworth.
Surgery repaired Mila Kunis’ eye trouble
In 2010, Kunis underwent surgery to correct the chronic iritis. “I’m not blind anymore. I had surgery a couple of months ago. They cut it open and dropped a new lens in there,” Kunis explained at the time. The surgery had no impact on the heterochromia, so Kunis’ uniquely hued eyes remain unchanged in appearance.
There is a bit of a lull in her filmography around this time with only one film — Friends with Benefits — releasing in 2011, but then Kunis was right back into the swing of things. Since then Kunis has had roles in Ted, The Spy Who Dumped Me, Bad Moms, Jupiter Ascending, Four Good Days, and more. It seems like the star has gotten the treatment she needed to protect her vision and is back to dominating her rise in Hollywood.
