October 20, 2006

Career Buff-Up with Ashton Kutcher

WALKING up the dusty Hollywood canyon in 100-degree heat, inhaling great gulps of smog, I begin to wonder if I'm being punk'd. It's not that I'm famous or anything, it's just that my hiking partner is Ashton Kutcher, who created the MTV show where people are subjected to elaborate, ego-puncturing practical jokes—they're punk'd. He's also well known for starring as the dumb brunet on That ‘70s Show, headlining such cinematic milestones as Dude, Where's My Car?, and marrying Demi Moore, who happens to be 15 years his senior, a May-December romance that has kept the tabloids titillated for years.

Kutcher assures me that this jaunt into heat exhaustion is not some elaborate goof. "I'm not that deviant," he says. "I always find it funny that people think they're getting punk'd when I'm around. That's the worst way to punk somebody, right?" He also insists that turning a reporter into a hyperventilating, dizzy, red-faced mass is not an extreme case of passive-aggressiveness either.

Venturing up the hill in the midday sun, he offers some advice. "Hydrate! Hydrate!" It's delivered in his best drill sergeant voice. The 28-year-old former Iowa boy is freakily good-looking in a slightly antiseptic, eternally boyish, Calvin Klein kind of way, with a long, lean figure, sculpted cheekbones and brown eyes bigger than your average doe's.

He arrived on a motorcycle, casually dropped his jeans to reveal gray shorts, strapped on a backpack and bandanna, then began to clip-clop blithely up the hill like a horse out for a casual saunter. He appears to be in good shape—in part because he's just back from his summer house in Idaho, the hills of the oxygen-deprived, and, oh, yes, he recently spent eight months doing six-hour-a-day workouts to get physically ready for his latest role, as a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in the adventure movie The Guardian.

Ashton Kutcher, action hero? It's kind of a change of pace for a guy whose résumé includes the airy comedies Cheaper by the Dozen, Guess Who and Just Married, and who's better known for the list of starlets he's dated than his cred as a macho man and thrasher of enemies.?

According to a master plan

ALAS, there seems to be a time in every young actor's career when he must try on the mantle of Tom Cruise—not the psychiatry-bashing, couch-jumping megastar of late but the Tom Cruise of the Top Gun era, the testosterone-pumped, arrogant hot-shot, who needs to have an attitude adjustment before he becomes the soldier-leader he's destined to become. Top Gun was the shiny, throbbing Jerry Bruckheimer version of the myth. An earlier incarnation was An Officer and a Gentleman, with a tight-lipped Richard Gere, a young Debra Winger and an overlay of class consciousness that gave the film a kick of importance. Kutcher's latest movie, The Guardian, plays as a mishmash of the two earlier films, with a dollop of Good Will Hunting and that film's feel-good pop psychology.

Given the country's ambivalence about the wars at hand, it's not surprising that Kutcher's version features a hero who's not fighting anyone but the ocean, who must make it through the hardest basic training there is and survive the maniacal tasks assigned by his instructor, the beaten-down former rescue swimmer extraordinaire Kevin Costner in the Louis Gossett Jr.-Robin Williams part.

If this strategy works out right, Kutcher will follow in a long line of male actors who turned into major international movie stars with the right action flick. Will Smith was just the amiable Fresh Prince of Bel-Air before he became a fighter pilot in Independence Day. Nicolas Cage was just a talented weirdo before Bruckheimer buffed and revamped him into a power he-man with such flicks as The Rock and Con Air. Unlike comedy, or drama, action is the one genre that works all across the globe, from India to the Ukraine to Latin America—and an ability to carry high-octane movies can justify a $20-million-plus paycheck.

Of course, the master plan to turn actors into heroes doesn't always pan out. Johnny Depp floundered in subpar actioners like Nick of Time before hitting his stride years later as a jaunty, subversive pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean. And Demi Moore, Mrs. Ashton Kutcher, proudly shaved her head and polished her body to star in G.I. Jane, which flopped ignobly.

"I believe that there are people who are bound and determined to be successful no matter what they're doing. I feel like no matter what [football great] Peyton Manning did, he would find success. He's just the kind of guy who buckles down at all costs. The idea of failing is just not an option," says Kutcher. "I'll find success no matter what. I believe it. It's truly contingent upon your will. I'm by no means the best actor. I'm by no means even the best actor in my age group." Hmmm, Heath Ledger and Leonardo DiCaprio come to mind. "But people know that I'm going to work hard for them. I think consistency pays. You can't will yourself to be successful in the business, but at the same time, I'm kind of living proof that you can."

This vaguely Tom Cruise-ian personal empowerment rant would be a lot more believable coming from a more prosaic source rather than a charter member of the tribe of the genetically blessed. In the old days, he used to self-deprecatingly refer to his face as "the money-maker" and willingly skewer his own celebrity.

"He is earnest," says Shawn Levy, who directed Kutcher in Just Married and Cheaper by the Dozen. "That's definitely the trait that surprises people. Ashton has always taken what he does and how he does it seriously, even on Just Married when he was a sitcom star with just one movie under his belt. The work ethic has been there from the get-go really strong, but there is a youthful goofiness that has given way to a more grown-up vibe."

Others in Hollywood who've just discovered Kutcher seem to marvel at the Ashton phenomenon, i.e., his seeming ability to connect with the prized teen-plus demographic. "I didn't realize the weight he has in youth culture," says The Guardian director Andrew Davis. "He connects with people. I think that is going to translate into huge stardom."

I finally get up the courage to ask about the elephant in the room: whether his relationship with Moore has somehow damaged his stock as an actor. The pair met at a dinner party when Kutcher was hosting Saturday Night Live in 2003, and ever since the tabloids have had a field day painting Kutcher as a boy toy, snapping endless shots of Moore, Kutcher, her three girls and her ex-husband, Bruce Willis. He doesn't like this question. A scrim falls over his features, each beautiful plane seems encased in plastic.

"Nah, my career is exactly where it's supposed to be. And my career isn't bad."

After they got married in a cabala wedding, "it's calmed down and everyone backed off. We're not adopting kids. We get to stay more mellow. The tabloids like blood and guts, like people breaking up, getting married, having babies and dying."

Born to a pair of factory workers who divorced when he was 13, Kutcher grew up in Iowa yearning to be an actor, though it didn't seem a particularly realistic goal. "There's not really a whole lot of acting things in Iowa. I felt that I needed a responsible career." He studied biochemical engineering for two years at college but dropped out after he won a modeling contest. Soon after, he was traveling the world modeling for the likes of Klein, Versace and Abercrombie & Fitch.

In his first pilot season out, he landed the role of sweet dimwit Kelso on the career-making sitcom That ‘70s Show.??

And then there's the producing

NOT long after, he launched his career as an impresario, with his own production company, Katalyst Films. The company not only produced Punk'd but also the recent reality hit Beauty and the Geek, which teams beautiful women with geeky but smart men.

It's clear with whom Kutcher identifies.

"I just think everybody feels like a geek, no matter who you are. You're an outsider. The asymmetry of the girls who got it their way and the guys who didn't," he says. Kutcher reels off other projects and says he's at the office 9 to 5 when he's not doing the movie-star thing. He even still pitches ideas for Punk'd. "Mine are usually the ones you can't pull off. Mine are on some other weird stratosphere, like trying to burn someone's house down," he says.

It's a lot for a second career, and at least once a month he suffers from a bout of insomnia, like the night before the hike. "I could not sleep. I was lying in bed. You know, when you're lying in bed and you start to think of all the things you should be doing and it just spirals? It's crazy."

He finally realized what was bothering him. "I'm leaving tomorrow for D.C., and I don't like being in the same city as George Bush." Kutcher once infamously told Rolling Stone about meeting the Bush twins at an event and bringing them back to his pad for an after-party where they were "underage drinking" and a friend of his was "smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah." He doesn't seem to be worried, however, about a replay, or an irate dad on his tail. His concerns are now political. Kutcher is no longer the perpetual party boy. He drives a motorcycle not just because it's cool but also because he "can't justify burning gas when people are being killed for it."

Being in the same city as America's commander in chief apparently gives him a major case of anxiety. "How many people did Osama kill in 9/11? A lot of people, but not nearly as many people as we killed in Iraq. Then I started thinking there's a lot more money in the oil business than there is in the entertainment business. How much is on George Bush's head?" he says. "It's like going out for a beer with Osama bin Laden. It's not a great place to be. I don't want to hang out in the same town as the President." This rant pops out of nowhere. For a moment he sounds a lot angrier and urgent than what seems to be his baseline persona of casually laid-back.

Part of the reason Kutcher wanted to make The Guardian, he explains, is "I just felt that America needs heroes. I just found heroes in these guys who dedicated their lives to save other people's lives. They don't have to kill anyone to do it. I thought it was a noble career."

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