Mila Kunis Reveals Why The Ending of 'Luckiest Girl Alive' Was Changed From The Book

At the end of Jessica Knoll‘s novel, Ani comes to terms with her trauma and the ‘reputation’ it gives her for some who will see her differently, like her mother and her fiancée Luke who she ends up leaving before they go through with getting married. She takes the new editor job that her “Women’s Magazine” boss grandfathers her into at “Glow Magazine,” choosing to live a life for herself, and for her past self.

For the movie, Ani drafts an essay about her own personal history with sexual assault, giving it to her editor to read and ultimately deciding to publish it at The New York Times Magazine after fleshing it out more so that it’s not ‘half-assed’ as her editor first critiques it. She explains her process to Luke, who never seems to be on the same page as her in terms of what she has been through. Ani also gets closure with the surviving classmate who raped her, Dean, when she secretly records a conversation they have in which he admits that he raped her.

Mila explains, “The cool thing about this movie is you get to hear the internal dialogue while you see the external actions, and they don’t always match up.”

“It’s like the cool thing about the juxtaposition of it all where you understand her logic. You hear her say it out loud, but she decides to go and do the wrong thing, and it’s really fun to play,” she adds.

Mila then shared that when she and Jessica collaborated on changing the ending, “that was the North Star for the character for that moment, that’s kudos to Jess for allowing that to happen. Who [Knoll] was when she wrote the book and her North Star when she wrote the book changed when she was writing the script.”

“We were working together and trying to figure out what is that new North Star. The original North Star was irrelevant at this point. We needed to figure out the character’s North Star and the biggest thing that we had to do was to separate Jess from the character.”

She went on, saying that Jessica not being strict in keeping Ani as she was in the book allowed “[director] Mike Barker and I to go and innovate and create a new North Star. So as far as, what’s the North Star for the character, it very much is the ending. It’s the the idea of your inner voice and your outer voice becoming one, which there’s a metaphor behind that but there’s also the literal moment in the movie where that happens.”

Just recently, Mila opened up about the one film of hers that she knew would be a flop.