On the hottest November day New York has seen in a decade, actor Ashton Kutcher was surrounded by thousands of people as he ran across the Brooklyn Bridge.
The star is part of the annual New York Marathon and had run the first 17 kilometers of the circuit when he felt a sharp pain in his hip.
At 44, Kutcher decided to challenge her physical capabilities for two reasons. A year earlier, he was admitted to the hospital due to an autoimmune disease, and he wants to prove to himself that he has not just recovered, but feels better than ever.
There is also money at stake in his finishing the marathon. The actor is running to support his nonprofit Thorn.
“I turned to God and told him that if he wanted to, he could send me every ounce of pain that he was capable of. I’m going to take it to the finish line,” the actor told Esquire about his marathon success.
This episode in New York for Kutcher is a turning point.
He feels that the last 25 years of tabloid fame and a career that has oscillated between sitcoms and comedies are over for him. He feels popular and rich enough to not pursue fame and money selfishly, but simply to enjoy life.
“My motto is: Invest in lasting happiness. Now I’m not worried about playing roles that I like. I want to tell stories that bring joy to people. I want to present them with stories that make them think. And I want to play characters , which are funny to me”, shares the star about the new direction in his career.
At the beginning of 2023, he appears on the screen for the first time in 9 years. Reincarnated as the goofy Michael Kelso from That 70s Show for one scene in the That 90s Show spinoff. His romantic comedy Your Place or Mine with Reese Witherspoon will premiere in February.
While it’s not the career he envisioned when he left Iowa and moved to New York to model, Kutcher says he’s happy with the way his life has turned out.
In the 90s, he had no idea what he was getting himself into, and the first time he went to a club was indicative of his gullibility.
Kutcher recalls that at the time he only had $100 in his pocket and was ready to spend it at the now-defunct Chaos on West Broadway. But when he walks in, instead of the bar, he heads to the purple roped off VIP area because he spots pop star Prince.
“At the time, I didn’t know what the purple VIP rope was for, so I just stepped over it and went to say hello to one of my heroes. I just told him, ‘You’re from Minnesota, and I’m from Iowa.’ Long live the Vikings (American football team). But his security cut me off and helped me back to my seat,” Kutcher said.
In those years, the actor lives in a cramped apartment with a bunch of other models, he is constantly in the red financially, and incidents like the one with Prince don’t happen every day. He had a rough start, as money was tight and he was too embarrassed to ask his father for help after turning down a job at the local factory and leaving college behind in his plans.
The torturous period was put behind him in 1998 when he was cast to play Michael Kelso in That 70s Show. A role he says made him a star because after its success, he started piling up project after project.
He starred in the pop culture phenomenon Dude, Where’s My Car, co-starred with Brittany Murphy in the box office hit Just Married, and was invited to host his own MTV reality show, where he performed tricks on celebrities.
Punk’d was an idea he came up with after chatting with friends, and MTV was willing to invest in it as long as it didn’t cause major celebrity headaches.
“I’ve destroyed every celebrity tape that asked for it. Absolutely every celebrity,” Kutcher claims.
2003 was a golden year for the actor. And just when he is at the peak of his popularity, the paparazzi find out that he is dating Demi Moore. To this day, he still remembers how his life turned upside down when the world found out he was dating Bruce Willis’ ex-wife.
A retinue of photographers chased him and Demi everywhere – in the restaurant, in the bar. His personal life becomes a form of entertainment. He is a 25-year-old party boy who, in his words, acts “like an ass with everyone else”, and she is a 40-year-old mother of three.
Nothing is more curious to people than where this Hollywood relationship will go, and Ashton himself provides fodder for rumors with his regular tweets. Now he thinks he did it for the attention. Since he was a child, he has tried to be noticed at all costs, and when he felt that the cameras were directed at him, he decided to take advantage.
“I love being the center of attention, and I won’t hide it. Everyone in show business loves attention, and if they say otherwise, they’re a fucking liar,” commented the actor.
However, there is another reason for his hyperactivity on social networks – he is very much in love at the time.
They married Demi Moore in 2005 and he became stepfather to her three girls. When the actress is on set, he took care of the children, and if that’s not romantic enough, remember that Kutcher befriended his wife’s ex-husband.
The tale ends when the couple lose their baby six months into Demi’s pregnancy. The actress blamed herself, fell into depression and started drinking, and the 26-year-old Ashton increasingly felt the happy family picture as a burden.
“It took a lot. I was 26, and I had three kids to take care of and a wife who was going through an extremely painful period. I guess some teenage parents go through the same thing in their 20s,” Kutcher shared.
The final point of his marriage with Demi Moore was put in 2011, and with the release of the memoirs of the actress, it becomes clear why it came to a divorce – infidelities on the part of Ashton and threesomes on his initiative, to which she agreed, because she believed that this would strengthen their relationship.
“I was so mad at her for writing it. I just lived more secluded and the paparazzi surrounded my house again to take pictures of me driving my kids to school,” Kutcher says.
In the same year, the actor led a media battle with another favorite person from cinema and television – Charlie Sheen. In 2011, Kutcher filled in as the second man on Two and a Half Men after the infamous firing of Uncle Charlie, and Sheen poured out all his bitterness on the replacement.
“I was in Two and a Half Men for the money. Financially it was a good idea, in many other ways, not so much. It wasn’t my wisest decision. The script we were working on was not the script that was offered to me. But no one warned me that I needed to think things through because they were financially incentivized not to,” Kutcher says of her four-year run on the sitcom.
However, this role is the last one that the actor accepts for money. After his investments in Spotify, Airbnb and Uber paid off handsomely, he no longer has to worry about his finances and can choose projects that are close to his heart.
Like his brief appearance on That 90s Show, where he was missing only one thing – the company of his close friend Danny Masterson, who played Hyde on the original That 70s Show.
Masterson was not invited to join the spinoff because of two rape cases in which the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
“I hope he’s innocent, but at the end of the day I can’t know for sure. I’m not a judge, I’m not a prosecutor, I’m not a victim and I’m not a defendant. In that case, I don’t think I have the right to comment,” opined is the actor.
The phase he is entering now has him moving away from these “hot” topics of conversation and focusing on himself, his family and his investment fund.
“I learned that no matter what we go through, we always have two choices – to accept the experience or to suppress it. When we start to suppress it, we question our reality. We say to ourselves: This is not my problem, this is not my thing.” Kutcher thinks.
He accepts that we may not always make the right decisions, but at least we can enjoy the time we learn from our mistakes.
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