Ashton’s reflection
In 2005 I was assigned to interview Ashton Kutcher for a magazine profile. I submitted the following piece, which was rejected for being “too dark” for that particular publication. I do believe the story has merit, and so I publish it here.
- Jan Gajewski
He was still Chris Kutcher then, a skinny and quiet kid and, at that very moment, cold with fear. He stood on a hospital balcony, leaning against the railing with his eyes trained on the pavement far below.
He was alone. He was 13. And for love, he was ready to jump.
He was ready because inside that hospital a boy was dying. This was Michael, Chris’ fraternal twin, the one with the Coke-bottle glasses and the hearing aid and the speech impediment, the one who could never beat Chris at basketball and the one who probably heard about it when they went to their bunk beds at night.
He was ready because out on that balcony, Chris could feel his heart pounding steadily inside his chest and that was exactly what his brother needed – a healthy heart; moments earlier, Chris had been in Michael’s hospital room when the heart monitor went flat and the alarm rang. Doctors yelled for him to get out of the room, then managed to revive Michael behind a closed door, and then told Chris’ family that Michael probably had about another hour left to live.
“Here’s this person, and we’re not identical twins but in a sense he’s the reflection of yourself, the person that you grow up with and go to school with everyday,” Kutcher says. “And all of a sudden, you’re reflection is shattered. All of the sudden, your reflection is fighting for his life.”
And so Chris stood, on that balcony, looking downward. “I was willing to give my life so that he could live,” he says. “And I kind of stood there with that thought.”
And Chris would soon witness his first miracle. …
Impressions
The man who shakes my hand is the same one I recognize from television. He goes now by his middle name, Ashton, and immediately he brings to mind laughter and silliness. I’ve come here to this quiet Los Angeles hotel to discuss with him “A Lot Like Love,” his next movie (opening April 22) that’s described as being about two people who think they couldn’t be more wrong for each other, but who eventually come to discover that what they have is actually – you guessed it – something a lot like love. The concept brings to mind something else about Ashton: his real-life and highly publicized relationship with actress Demi Moore, who at 42 is 15 years Ashton’s senior.
But in the 90 or so minutes that I will spend with him at this hotel, the two of us sharing a lounge-area couch, Ashton will concede very little about that aspect of his life, at one point saying: “I’m not going to expose or volunteer information about my personal life. To get it out of the way: Do I love Demi? Absolutely I love her – I wouldn’t be with her if I didn’t love her. Do I love her kids? Absolutely. Anything more than that I don’t know that it’s relevant to the story.”
And so we talk about other things, things not usually associated with Ashton Kutcher, the actor, but things absolutely essential in understanding Ashton Kutcher, the person. And by the time he shakes my hand again, this time to say goodbye, he is still the man I know but no longer the one I’d recognized. I’d known the loud, dim-witted character he’d played on “That ‘70s Show,” or the giggling architect of MTV’s hidden-camera prank show, “Punk’d.” But here was someone different, someone disappearing now down the main hotel staircase, quietly.
Memories
“I’m standing on the balcony of the University of Iowa Hospital, thinking about jumping off, and my dad comes out to me and says, ‘What are you thinking about?’” Kutcher remembers. “I tell him. He comes over to me and says, ‘You can’t do that,’ and right then the doctors come rushing out (saying), ‘We have to prepare the O.R. A woman died in Florida in a car accident, and there’s a heart on the way.’”
His brother Michael Kutcher, who was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy and encountered numerous health ailments throughout childhood – including cardiomyopathy, a disease in which the heart muscle becomes inflamed – somehow held on long enough for the heart to arrive from Florida. The transplant surgery was successful, and today Michael Kutcher, according to his brother, lives a very quiet, happy and healthy life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“But I never let him win at basketball,” Kutcher says while shaking his head and looking to the floor. “Maybe I should have.”
So we begin with Ashton’s regret, a regret rooted in childhood and nourished by Hollywood: “I hold my guilt for being in the position I’m in and I’m trying to let go of that,” he says. “I’m so blessed it’s ridiculous. I never had a lead in a high school play, I wasn’t fast with the girls in high school, I didn’t have an ability to make people laugh, I couldn’t even tell a good joke. There’s really absolutely no reason that I should be here today. There’s no way it should have been me.”
But it is this way despite a rocky upbringing in both Cedar Rapids and Homestead, Iowa – population 100. Ashton is the son of two one-time factory workers who constantly struggled to make ends meet, who argued repeatedly and who divorced within a year after Michael received his new heart. “I saw some stuff that I probably shouldn’t have seen,” Kutcher says, looking to the floor again 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.”
And so to prevent himself from feeling, Ashton stayed away from home and kept busy – playing sports, singing in the choir and acting in school plays. Fascinated by science and determined to find a cure for the heart ailment that had plagued his brother, Ashton went on to the University of Iowa to study biochemical engineering. He was on track to be a geneticist when during his sophomore year a talent scout spotted him in a bar and urged him to enter a modeling contest that would ultimately pave the path to Hollywood.
When asked about leaving school and a life of science, Ashton goes on a 10-minute tangent, saying that he thought about that long and hard but eventually came to two conclusions: First, college would always be there. Second, he explains, “At that point in time I’d really figured out that the physical aspect is not what changes the quality of one’s life – which is funny because I go into modeling, which is all about the physical aspect. But I understood for myself that scientists can keep chasing, but until we figure out what’s causing it … I’m just saying I can be more effective by changing the cause. That’s what I want to do.”
I ask him what he means, and he begins to unveil his master plan …
Spreading the Love
Kutcher, now 27, is a big believer of two things: That fateful day at the University of Iowa Hospital, he says, opened his eyes to miracles, while his own unlikely journey from Homestead to Hollywood has left him of the opinion that everything in life really does happen by design.
“My star chart says that I should have been a scientist,” he says. “I took the wrong path, but that’s okay.” It’s okay not because that wrong path has led him to a life of luxury, but because that wrong path has led him to a life of laughter – Kutcher’s Hollywood success primarily coming as the result of his ability to make people smile via characters like TV’s Kelso. To that end, Kutcher likes to believe that in his own small way, he is affecting more lives than he ever could have as a scientist by spreading a little laughter and love – elements far more important to one’s quality of life, he believes, than any of the elements found in the periodic table.
As for his own life, Kutcher says he is continually evolving, continually growing, continually working to improve his personal relationships with both family and friends.
“I guess the bigger message for me is that we are literally responsible for everything that happens in our life,” he says. “And if we stop blaming other people, which is a hard thing to do – I do it, we all do it – then, instead of having a life where our relationships are a lot like love, we’ll have relationships where we have love.
“I think once you actually obtain true, absolute love, when you’re willing to do absolutely anything for that person, I think that’s when you … you become Superman.”
He pulls on his beanie and looks up from the floor. It is at this moment when you think of Christopher Ashton Kutcher on that hospital balcony, looking down, and begin to realize how a skinny, quiet kid from Iowa learned how to fly.
Addendum: Michael Kutcher is now a spokesperson and advisor for the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, and an advocate for organ donation. For more information, visit http://michaelkutcher.com/.
© Jan Gajewski
Photo By David Shankbone - David Shankbone, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10261539
