Issue Date: April 10, 2005
Profile: Ashton's great balancing act
You may think you know this movie and TV star as silly and mischievous. But as Demi Moore knows, there's another side to Ashton Kutcher.
By Josh Gajewski
Ashton Kutcher will soon admit to something I already know: He is a stalker.
"There's no way I could have possibly ever anticipated this kind of exposure."
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At least that's what moviegoers can hear him tell his co-star Amanda Peet in their romantic comedy "A Lot Like Love" when it opens next week. "Are you stalking me now?" she plainly asks Kutcher during their coincidental meeting. He pauses, flashes a mischievous grin and responds playfully, "Yes."
So what if it's a movie? I know just what Peet's character is talking about, and you probably do, too. From the small to the big screen, to the tabloids that greet you at the supermarket checkout line, it is beginning to feel like there's no escaping this Kutcher Show: all Ashton, all the time.
My own experience began on a Sunday, when I clicked on the TV and there he was, waving the green flag to start NASCAR's Daytona 500. It continued into Monday, when I met him in the dark lounge of a quiet hotel in West Hollywood for this interview, but unexpectedly stretched into later that day when I saw him at a Barnes & Noble, his dark brown eyes looking up at me from the glossy pages of three magazines. On Tuesday, he was on my TV again, this time as dimwitted Kelso on two syndicated episodes of his Fox series, "That '70s Show." Wednesday, as I drove south on Los Angeles' Highland Avenue, that familiar face peered down at me from a giant billboard ad for another movie, "Guess Who," now in theaters. Cut to Thursday, and there he was faking out Kanye West on MTV's "Punk'd;" later that day, he went mushy about love on "Oprah."
I was beginning to wonder. Are you stalking me now, Mr. Kutcher?
"There's no way I could have possibly ever anticipated this kind of exposure," Kutcher says to me in the hotel lounge, his face partly masked by a stubbly beard and a black beanie that's pulled down to his eyebrows. "There is a bizarre shift that is taking place while I've been in the acting business in the exposure and the need to write about people's relationships. The media has literally turned our lives into the show."
But when you're 27 with two hit TV shows, and your relationship is with a 42-year-old stunner named Demi Moore, it happens. For nearly two years now, Kutcher has been hounded by questions about the romance and his relationship with Moore's three girls -- not to mention her ex, Bruce Willis. When I sat with Kutcher, the tabloids were abuzz about a new ring on Moore's engagement finger, leading to predictable speculation. And at press time, three weeks later, the gossip was that Moore was pregnant. At this rate, the couple will have secretly tied the knot and been spotted shopping for cribs by the time you read this.
But back to the jewelry: "If that was an engagement ring," Kutcher says, smiling, "I don't think we'd be engaged for very long. It's like a little piece of coral on a little piece of gold. Come on now! That wouldn't fly. Now let's get serious."
Seriously, it wasn't always this way. Not all that long ago, Kutcher was a skinny, quiet kid in tiny Homestead, Iowa, who couldn't get a lead in a school play, wasn't "fast with the girls" and "couldn't even tell a good joke," he remembers.
Kutcher is the son of factory workers who struggled to make ends meet and divorced when he was 13. The same year, he was at the bedside of his ailing twin, Michael, born with a mild form of cerebral palsy, when Michael almost died. (For more on the Kutchers' hospital trauma, see box at right.) Ashton spent much of his childhood, he explains, just trying to stay out of his family's way.
"I saw some stuff I probably shouldn't have seen," Kutcher says, looking to the floor while tugging at his beanie, "and I didn't want to be involved, and I didn't want to have to take a side. I [also] didn't want to come home and find more bad news about my brother. ... I kept myself so busy that I didn't allow myself to feel."
His focus turned to drama, sports and, of all things, science. Fascinated by ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acids (RNA and DNA), Kutcher went on to study biochemical engineering at the University of Iowa. He worked sweeping up Cheerios dust at a General Mills plant, donated his blood for cash to help pay tuition -- and planned to be a geneticist. Even today, he says, "I get so excited when Rumer or Scout [two of Moore's children] has homework that involves Punnett squares [a graphic way of predicting the likelihood of inheriting a particular trait] or something. That's when I'm loving it."
In 1997, Kutcher's life took a 180 when a talent scout spotted him in a bar and urged him to enter a modeling contest. He won, and soon chose modeling over molecules, dropping out of college and onto the fashion catwalks of Milan and Paris. In 1998, he flew to Los Angeles and on his first day there auditioned for "That '70s Show." After seven years on the hit series, he and co-star Topher Grace both have said they won't return as regulars next fall. "I don't want to do the same stuff over and over," Kutcher says.
Whether anyone else wants him to change from the goofy prankster he's made famous remains to be seen. When Kutcher veered drastically away from comedy with 2004's "The Butterfly Effect," a dark thriller he produced and starred in, the results were mixed. The movie made nearly $60 million, a success given that it cost $13 million to make. But reviews of Kutcher's performance were harsh, and gaining critics' respect as a dramatic actor appears to be an uphill climb.
"A lot of critics have bought into his dumb image from things like "Dude, Where's My Car?" and "That '70s Show" and assume that's the real thing," says Gary Susman, a senior writer for "Entertainment Weekly's" Web site, ew.com. "That expectation of him hurts him among critics, and unless he does something really radical that changes his image and shows some range, I don't think critics will change their minds."
Wilmer Valderrama, Kutcher's friend and '70s Show castmate -- who, like Kutcher, plays an air-headed skirt-chaser and has been tabloid fodder for dating celebrities (Lindsay Lohan is an ex-girlfriend) -- contends that beneath Kutcher's clueless exterior lies, well, someone else. "Somehow people forget he's not Kelso and I'm not Fez, even though we're so different," Valderrama says. "In a way, that's the biggest compliment we can get as performers."
Perhaps I'm guilty of forgetting, too. Toward the end of my interview with Kutcher, I tell him he comes off so different in person -- quiet, intelligent, thoughtful -- and he looks up with a smirk and makes me feel like the dummy.
"They're characters," he says. "I'm an actor. People don't know that all the time."
I ask whether that bothers him, and he says: "That's the greatest advantage I have as a human being. That's what I want people to see. For me, my private life ..."
His voice trails off, and he allows for silence to complete the thought. A few minutes later he shakes my hand goodbye, disappears down a twisting staircase and leaves me wondering whether we're watching him or it's the other way around.
Josh Gajewski is a freelancer based in Los Angeles. He last wrote for USA WEEKEND Magazine about Ryan Seacrest.
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Ashton Makes a Difference
At age 13, Michael Kutcher, Ashton's twin brother, lay in a University of Iowa hospital bed, on the verge of death. He had developed cardiomyopathy, a heart disease. At one point, after his heart had momentarily stopped and he had to be revived, doctors told the family that Michael probably had only hours to live.
Ashton, then known by his first name, Chris (Ashton is his middle name), found himself out on a hospital balcony, he says, ready to jump. He thought his death would allow his brother to live -- with Ashton's healthy heart. "I'm standing on the balcony, thinking about jumping off, and my dad comes out and says, 'What are you thinking about?' " Ashton recalls. "I tell him. He comes over and says, 'You can't do that' -- and right then the doctors come rushing out, [saying], 'We have to prepare the OR. A woman died in Florida in a car accident, and there's a heart on the way.' "
The transplant surgery was a success, and today, according to his brother, Michael lives a quiet, happy, healthy life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Meanwhile, Ashton is forever thankful to those at the University of Iowa Hospitals in Iowa City. In 2001, he hoped to compete on the hospitals' behalf on a celebrity edition of ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," but he eventually opted out, reportedly because he didn't want to upset his bosses at Fox by appearing on another network. Fox gave $32,000 to the hospitals' Patient Transplant Support Fund, and Kutcher has since made multiple contributions.
-- Josh Gajewski
Cover and cover story photographs by Robert Sebree for USA WEEKEND. Grooming by Tracey Levy. Styling by Michael Cioffoletti, Celestine.
Clothing: Cover -- Shirt by Burberry; T-shirt and jeans by John Varvatos. Above -- Shirt by Modern Amusement; jeans by John Varvatos; shoes by John Varvatos for Converse.
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