August 19, 2025, 9:09 am | Read time: 3 minutes
Actors often endure significant hardships for their dream roles. This includes learning new dialects or skills such as playing instruments. The process can be physically and mentally demanding. Hollywood star Mila Kunis can apparently attest to this: On the 15th anniversary of “Black Swan,” she revealed how she prepared for the role of the ballet dancer. It seems this period might have been the toughest of her career, as it included an unbelievable twelve hours of dance training daily!
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Director Darren Aronofsky and the film’s eventual lead actress, Natalie Portman, worked for ten years to bring “Black Swan,” a horror film about ballet, to life. It was Portman who suggested Mila Kunis for the supporting role of her rival. Her reasoning: Kunis had danced ballet before and thus had experience. Kunis recently clarified in a “Vogue” interview that this was somewhat exaggerated. “I think I said, ‘I danced once,’ and it was twisted into me having danced en pointe,” Kunis emphasized. Regardless, she ultimately got the role, likely because she assured Aronofsky she would do whatever it took. “Black Swan” indeed demanded a lot from Mila Kunis. She had to transform both visually and in her dance skills into a convincing prima ballerina.
“Very Little Eating and a Lot of Dancing”
“My preparation consisted of a lot of dancing and very little eating–I know one shouldn’t really say that, but it’s the truth,” Mila Kunis reflected. In the interview, she elaborated on what this entailed. “I drank a lot of broth and danced twelve hours a day,” Kunis said.
The originally planned three months of preparation turned into six months due to a delay in the start of filming. This meant Mila Kunis had to endure the extreme diet longer, but she and colleague Natalie Portman were glad to have more time to learn ballet.
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Bruises and a Dislocated Shoulder
Not only was the preparation for “Black Swan” extremely taxing for the actresses, but the filming itself was also demanding. “We filmed those dance scenes for hours, and I had bruises all over my ribs from being lifted repeatedly,” Kunis recalled. “I also dislocated my shoulder early in the production and thought I was done for, but Darren sent me to an acupuncturist, and somehow I was completely fine afterward.”
Mila Kunis’ Experience Comes Close to the Life of Real Ballet Dancers
What Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman endured for several months before the film and during filming is just part of everyday life for ballet dancers. Ballerina Louisa Paterson, a celebrated star at Berlin’s Friedrichstadt-Palast, shared this with us in a FITBOOK interview a few years ago. She criticized the categorical denigration of food in ballet schools. Although she and other young dancers exercised all day, eating was frowned upon. While they were never told to starve, they were left completely alone regarding nutrition, causing significant insecurity. More so! “If they saw us eating ‘too much’ or carbohydrates, they looked at us disapprovingly, and it was always, ‘Don’t eat that.’ But they never told us what we should eat. In the end, we thought we weren’t allowed to eat anything,” Paterson revealed.