Ashton Kutcher: ‘I just feel so darned grown-up!’

May 9 2008 Western Mail

Ashton Kutcher had a reputation as a party boy until he married a woman 15 years his senior, who happened to be Demi Moore. But as Rob Driscoll discovers, Kutcher is keen to redress the birthday boundaries once and for all

HE’LL forever be tagged as Demi Moore’s toy-boy husband, but at the age of 30, Ashton Kutcher reckons he’s a lot more mature than many of his contemporaries – and age is just a number.

“I just feel so darned grown-up,” laughs the Iowa-born actor who turned the big Three-Zero last February. “The number is inconsequential. I know a lot of 40-year-olds who act like 10-year-olds, and I know a lot of 10-year-olds who act like 40-year-olds.”

The clean-cut, good-looking star of Dude, Where’s My Car? and The Butterfly Effect has, in fact, got a fascinating theory about how the whole ageing process should be recorded by mankind.

“I think they should change the measure, from how long you’ve been here to how much responsibility you have, or how much you’ve taken on in your life,” he suggests. “That should be the age barometer, for me.

“You should have a docket that you have to fill in; you send that in and they send you a form back which says you’re actually 54. Or vice versa. To me, it’s just the level of responsibility you have in your life, and 30 was just a reason to throw a party and not get hepatitis.”

That final, off-the-wall comment is another, typical Kutcher throwaway, the kind of gag that proves he’s still a youngster at heart really – or at least, not exactly about to join the local bridge club.

He married Moore in September 2005, just as Kutcher was voted the world’s most eligible bachelor by Tatler, beating Prince William to the top spot. Up until then, he had garnered something of a reputation for partying wild and hard. And some have suggested that only an older woman could have tamed him. But does having an older partner – Moore is 15 years his senior – help make a person more mature?

“I really don’t know,” says Kutcher. “I’ve only been married once. It’s weird, when I was 13 my parents got divorced and my dad moved down the block, and then when I was 14 my mom moved to a different city, so I’ve kind of always been around older people – my friends were always a little bit older.

“My best friend was six years older than I was, he was the neighbour kid. I spent a lot of time with my mom when I was young, and her friends. I was always more interested in adult conversation. So maybe I just like adults. I like grown-ups, I guess!”

In his latest hit movie, broad romantic comedy What Happens in Vegas, Kutcher and co-star Cameron Diaz play a couple of strangers who share a booze-fuelled night of revelry in Sin City. The next day, with no recollection of the night before, they wake up to discover they are married.

The pair quickly agree on a divorce, but things get complicated, when it transpires that not only did they tie the knot after tying one on, but they later scored $3m on a gambling slot machine – he played the machine, but with her quarter. So whose loot is it anyway?

After taking their predicament to court, a judge freezes the money and orders the desperate duo to “six months hard marriage” – and if they can prove to a marriage guidance counsellor (Queen Latifah) that they’ve made an effort to honour their vows, they can split the cash. But a lot can happen in six months…..

He’s played feckless newlyweds before – most notably in Just Married – but the very happily-married Kutcher reckons there’s a lot of truth in what the movie is ultimately saying.

“I think you have to be able to connect to the end of the movie, in order to deliver the end of the movie,” he says (and of course we wouldn’t dream of revealing how the film’s story turns out). “I think if you can’t connect to what that is, it’s hard to really feel that. It’s just an open awareness of love.”

“There’s a book that a friend of mine just recently wrote. He’s actually my teacher, and he’s sort of taught me how to navigate a relationship successfully. The book is going to be coming out soon, and it’s called The Spiritual Rules of Engagement. It’s really a guide of how you navigate a relationship successfully, so I have to credit a lot of the success in my relationship to my teacher.”

Yet could the movie’s “get-married-first-then-fall-in-love” strategy really work?

“Well, what we’re all normally doing doesn’t seem to be working very well, with the divorce rate – so why not try something different?” says a suddenly philosophical Mr. K.

“I think the biggest problem in relationships in general is that guys are raised with the goal of having sex – like when you’re a teenage boy, the whole goal is having sex, right? You think, ‘Some day I’m going to have sex, and then I’m going to be a man, and that’s going to be life’.

“Women, meanwhile, have this whole goal of getting married, of finding the husband, so we’re kind of missing each other there, and what we’re really missing is nobody has the goal of being married. Nobody’s goal is to be married and live within the being-married part. It’s more about the wedding, the event – not the aftermath.” Nobody’s thinking about walking round the house in their slippers, while he’s in the robe with his gut hanging out!

“You don’t think of that as being the wedding. The wedding is the event, so nobody is really working towards being married as a goal. Our movie is really about being married in a truer sense, which is the idea that it ain’t always pretty, and that’s when you find out who’s got the guts.”

Kutcher is clearly doing something very right when it comes to his own marriage. He says the experience has been helped no end by being able to forge a good relationship with Moore’s three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, as well as maintaining a friendly relationship with their father, Bruce Willis.

“It helps that they are girls,” he says. “If they were boys, there would be some competition, but because they are girls, they compete with their mother. It’s not like I get to be their best friend, mind you! I just guide them in different ways.”

At the moment, Kutcher’s successful career might suggest he’s become a dab hand at feelgood farces and cosy comedies but in actual fact he’s keen to progress further down the straight drama road. He even surprised himself by taking on What Happens In Vegas.

“I just wasn’t in the mood to do a comedy,” he reveals. “You know, sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you feel like you have the energy, because it takes a lot of energy to be funny. For me it does, I feel like I work twice as hard when I’m doing comedy.

“But when I got the script for this one, for the first 30 or 40 pages I was laughing out hard, really hard, multiple times – and when that happens, you have to stop and realise something is really working here.” Then when I heard Cameron Diaz was signed on – well, you can’t go turning that down, can you?”

His next two movies will be dramas, however – Personal Effects, with Michelle Pfeiffer, and Spread, with Laura Linney and Anne Heche. Does this mean that he’s giving up the funny stuff for good, in some grander bid to prove himself as a serious actor?

“Not at all!” he enthuses. “In truth, I didn’t know if I was ready to make What Happens in Vegas, yet doing this movie, it really changed my whole perspective on making movies because I had fun. I had a really good time making the movie; every single day, I went to work and I had fun. And so it really changed my perspective on how I felt about it, it was a blessing. So I’m definitely in no hurry to throw that feeling away.”

What Happens in Vegas opens today.