Today, Ashton Kutcher is 44 years old and famous, extremely famous for a quarter of a century. But the truth is, it’s been a while since we last saw him on screen.
It has been nine years since his last feature film. (The exception being his brilliant supporting performance last year in The Revenge, the directorial and writing debut of BJ Novak.) It’s been three years since his last TV role.
In a special interview with Esquire, Ashton Kutcher admits that the thought “maybe I’ve been this far” crosses his mind. But he keeps it a secret and now, a few years later, it’s back with a bang. He’s doing it with the romantic comedy Your Place or Mine, which will premiere on Netflix on February 10.
But that’s not all. Kutcher also reprises the role that made him famous – that of Kelso in the sitcom “Dizzy Years”. And while the characters he’s chosen for his comeback are familiar, he approaches the work from a whole new angle.
After his early career and more than a decade of frenzied tabloid attention, Kutcher has definitely found his place in the sun. He is married to his old girlfriend Mila Kunis and is enjoying fatherhood.
But Kutcher is extremely independent financially, thanks to his successful venture capital investments in tech companies like Airbnb and Uber. Therefore, he is ready not just to enjoy life, but to challenge it – just as he does with himself.
“Now I can worry about playing the roles I want to play,” he says. “I want to tell stories that say something. I want to tell stories that bring people joy. I want to present stories that make people think. And I want to play characters that are fun to play. And I’m ready to break the ass off work to do it.”
26 years ago, Ashton Kutcher made his way from Iowa to New York with a hundred dollars in his pocket and no idea what he was getting himself into. When he walks into a club for the first time, he notices Prince sitting behind a velvet rope in a VIP area. But Kutcher had never seen a velvet VIP rope before and didn’t realize it was put there to serve as a barrier. He crosses it to greet one of his idols, addressing him with the line: “You’re from Minnesota and I’m from Iowa.” The guard doesn’t take long and escorts him back to his side of the rope.
At the time, Kutcher was living in an apartment with a bunch of other young models barely making ends meet. “I was devastated. Dad didn’t approve of the move. He couldn’t believe his son would give up a job at the local General Mills factory, let alone give up college.” That is why Kutcher silently continues to suffer. “I didn’t want anyone to tell me I had to go home,” he says.
But this situation does not last long. A year later, Kutcher took a 48-hour trip to LA for two acting auditions. He gets both roles, but has to choose one of them. It stops at the right one. The Vertigo Years debuted on August 23, 1998, and Kelso made Kutcher a star. But the success of the series is not enough for him.
His first film, “Dude, Where’s My Car?” was released in December 2000 and became an inescapable idiom, part of the pop culture of its time. Followed by “Broken” in 2003.
That same year, after founding his own production company, Ashton Kutcher filmed the reality show Punk’d and The Butterfly Effect, a thriller and his first dramatic role. Everything happens like clockwork and success after success follows.
“I will never deny the fact that I love attention,” he says. “And anyone who’s part of the entertainment industry and says they don’t like the attention is a fucking liar.” But this attention has its limits.
At that time, the actor began dating Demi Moore. And suddenly he becomes not just a star, but a favorite object of the tabloids. “The moment that information came out, my life changed,” says Kutcher. And the two are the curious ones – she, a 40-year-old mother of three, and he, the party-goer, 15 years younger than her, are on the cover of every gossip publication. But he is so in love…
Before he met Demi, Ashton had no children, but after they married in 2005, he became stepfather to her three daughters with Bruce Willis. But the idea of having another child sounds incredible to him. Unfortunately, the two are not so lucky. Demi Moore becomes pregnant but loses their baby girl, which is a heavy blow to both of them.
Several years followed with various in vitro procedures in unsuccessful attempts to get the actress pregnant. They also became the reason he started drinking, as Demi Moore herself revealed in her memoir Inside Out in 2019.
And Kutcher didn’t help their relationship much at the time. With one of the first massively followed Twitter accounts, he prompts the press to publish any number of headlines about rumors from anonymous sources. Looking back today, he says his posts only invited the media to meddle even more in their lives.
“It’s silly to complain about things you contribute to,” he says, however. He also admits that raising three children at that time was too much for him. “I was 26, I was responsible for an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old.” However, Kutcher still keeps in touch with the girls, who are now women. “They were great then and they’re great now. But all together, I definitely liked it more then.”
“Do you think about that miscarriage differently now?” Esquire asked him. Kutcher pauses, then replies:
“Losing a child that you think you’re going to have when you’re so close to thinking you’re going to have a child is really, really painful,” he begins. “Everyone deals with it in different ways.” But he does not say how he managed then, but continues:
“I love children. I wouldn’t marry a woman who has three children if I didn’t. But the idea of having another child was great.”
But Kutcher can’t change what happened. And if Moore’s miscarriage shook him, their 2011 breakup devastated him. “Nothing makes you feel like a failure like a divorce. It makes you feel like a fucking failure. Like a failed marriage.”
After the breakup, he and Demi Moore are moving on – each in his own way and as he sees fit. However, their relationship was brought back into the spotlight in 2019 thanks to Demi’s memoir.
Ashton admitted to Esquire that he “was furious” about what she wrote in the book, including the alleged threesomes and infidelities. “I finally got to a place where the press really didn’t care about me and Mila and my life and my family. The book came out and, bam! — the next day the paparazzi were at my kids’ school.”
And here the actor also lifts the curtain on his relationship with Mila Kunis. A year after breaking up with Demi Moore, the two began dating. He is then 33 years old and on the mend, getting over not only his ex but himself.
Then Mila Kunis told him that he was not his best version. She even tells him straight to his face that he’s an “ass” “Was I…?” she remembers Kutcher asking her. And without batting an eye, she tells him, “Yeah, you were an asshole for two whole years.”
He takes the hit. Work on yourself. He fell head over heels in love again and their first child, a girl, appeared in 2014. On July 4, 2015, the two got married. In 2016, a son was born to them.
“What made our relationship with Mila grow so quickly was that I’ve always admired her,” says Kutcher. “Her talents, her skills, her gifts. But I knew she didn’t need me. And she knew I didn’t need her. But there was another thing: We already knew all our dirt.”
And so the family lived happily until one day in 2019, Kutcher woke up with a migraine. Terrible migraine. And even though he’s had migraines all his life, this time it’s scarier. He can’t sleep and nothing helps his pain. For two weeks it only got worse.
“Something’s wrong,” Kunis tells him. And so they turn to doctors for help. The diagnosis is not too late. Soon it becomes difficult for the actor to see and even hear. Struggling with vertigo, he can’t keep his balance and can’t walk. At one point, Kutcher spent seven days on his back in a hospital bed. He was eventually diagnosed with vasculitis, a rare autoimmune disease.
During his treatment, doctors said that the sooner he started doing the things he used to do, the better the chance of a full recovery. Exercise helps, but how to exercise when he can’t even walk. Kutcher tries, but fails — again and again. And that infuriates him. He wants to get up and play with his children, but he can’t do that either. After a month, he starts to move little by little. He also starts doing exercises. It takes him nearly a year to fully recover.
Kutcher never planned to go public with his diagnosis. He spends much of the pandemic in rehab, and with the world largely open again, he wants to spend his time feeling alive again.
It goes to Antarctica. He climbs a mountain at the South Pole. He is learning to ski. Signing up for a marathon. “It was a test of my courage,” he says. He also goes on an adventure with Bear Grylls.
While filming National Geographic’s Running Wild with Bear Grylls, Kutcher says he had a heart-to-heart with the host, which he says wasn’t recorded. In this conversation, he talks about his health and even though he knows there are cameras, he asks Grylls not to share this information. When the episode aired in August 2022, news of the actor’s illness spread at breakneck speed.
Today, Ashton Kutcher is not angry about what happened. “At the end of the day, I have to look at it and say, ‘Okay, well, maybe it should have come out.’ this…” He’s not convinced, but adds, “I hope it happens.”
Sympathy isn’t really something he’s comfortable with. He is afraid of the questions that will follow the revelation. And especially from one: Are you okay?
“Whatever you’re going through, you have two choices: accept it as part of the experience or reject it as part of the experience. And the moment you start to reject it as part of the experience, you start to question reality.”
At the moment, the life of the actor is quite calm. He wakes up around 5:30. It works. He cooks the children’s breakfast together with his wife. Then they pack their school lunches and drive them to school. Then they return home and everyone in their home office gets down to business for the day.
When the last school bell rings, Kutcher and Kunis are there to pick them up. If it’s gymnastics day, Kunis is on call. If it’s a scout meeting, it’s Kutcher. The whole family goes to taekwondo together. They prepare dinner and eat together. As a couple, they’re social, but Kutcher’s partying days, mostly involving weed and booze, are a distant memory. “I haven’t used drugs in ten years,” he says.
Now, Kutcher is intensely focused on being the best parent he can be. He and Kunis read a lot of books on the subject. And they seriously consider how to make the best decisions. Fun is crucial for them.
Kutcher was raised Catholic, but studied Judaism during his first marriage. Born in the Ukraine, Kunis is Jewish, though not particularly religious.
“So we do Shabbat, we do Hanukkah… But then we also celebrate Christmas. Then Passover, but also Easter. Holidays are fun. We have to celebrate,” Kutcher is categorical and does not hide that the most important thing for him is his family.
