“Welcome to the chaos,” Mila Kunis says, her eyes moving in an arc across the soaring timbered living room where at one end her son, Dmitri, 5, who has always been called Bear, hammers out a precociously plaintive series of chords on the grand piano. “At age 3, he composed a song on guitar about how we abandoned him to go to New York for a day.”

Kutcher has said that his wife will do anything for a laugh. She cannot deny this. But Kunis, 39, who rose to fame on That ’70s Show before emerging as a big-screen rom-com queen, has of late been the grown-up in the room. In March of this year, that room was the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, where she and her husband may have been the only audience members who did not give Will Smith a standing ovation when he won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

“The idea of leading by example,” Kunis explains, “only makes sense when you actually have someone to lead. We have our tiny little tribe here at home, and never once do I want to tell them to do something if I’m not willing to do it myself. Not standing up to me was a no-brainer, but what was shocking to me was how many people did stand up. I thought, wow, what a time we’re living in that rather than do what’s right, people focus on doing what looks good. It’s insane to me.”

Keeping up appearances—in fact, rigorously maintaining a glamorous veneer to cover over the pangs of the past—is the subject of Luckiest Girl Alive, which debuted in theaters on Sept. 30 and started streaming on Netflix on Oct. 7. Kunis, who these days is very choosy with her roles and is only willing to shoot when her kids are on their summer break, produced and stars in the film based on Jessica Knoll’s bestselling novel of the same name.Kunis has been telling a very coherent story lately about living according to one’s convictions—and putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. Time magazine acknowledged this when it included her on its “100 Most Influential People of 2022” list after she raised nearly $40 million to bring supplies to Ukrainians affected by the war and housing to its refugees. Kunis was born in Ukraine, and she was 7 when her family emigrated to the United States on a refugee visa in order to escape the Soviet era’s structural antisemitism. They settled in West Hollywood, and her parents still live in the apartment where she grew up.