|
He may have forged a sideline in playing men unable to commit to relationships, as in his hit new film What Happens In Vegas, but in real life Ashton Kutcher prizes his marriage to Demi Moore as FOCUS finds out.
While he may have promiscuously played the field of movie genres in a career that runs the gamut from Dude, Where’s My Car? to The Butterfly Effect, Ashton Kutcher consistently returns to playing characters experiencing the pain of heartache and a singular reluctance to settle down.
The boyish looking 30 year old revisits this theme in What Happens In Vegas where he is cast as party animal Jack Fuller, who is carefree and single until a debauched night in Las Vegas sees him get drunkenly hitched to strait laced stockbroker Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz).
Clearly this is not a promising relationship in the making, but in the midst of their first, furious row they hit a quite different sort of jackpot on the slot machines and find themselves bound by the three million dollar prize that they legally must share. Unless, that is, one can trick the other into forfeiting it all for the sake of a quickie divorce.
What with the romantic travails of Just Married, Guess Who and A Lot Like Love this is a genre that Kutcher returns to with metronomic consistency, which is all the more ironic given the fact that he has been married for the last two and a half years to actress Demi Moore. Kutcher, however, sees no contradiction, noting that these rom-coms invariably have happy endings anyway.
"It’s just an open awareness of love," he nods, "I think you have to be able to connect with all that in order to deliver the end of the movies. There's actually a book that a friend of mine just wrote, he's actually my teacher and taught me how to navigate a relationship successfully. The book is called The Spiritual Rules of Engagement, so I have to credit a lot of our success to him."
There might seem to be something of the frat boy humour to him, the knowing sense of the ridiculous and the prankster element conjured up by his hidden camera show Punk'd, but Ashton Kutcher has his mature side.
He's becoming something of a Hollywood player, increasingly involved in a producing capacity on his movies. Even on What Happens In Vegas, where he had no such responsibility, he took a pro-active hand in getting it made.
"I was talking to Emma Watts, who's one of the executives at Fox, and she asked what it would take to get me to do this movie. I said 'get me a great director and a great co-star and we'll work out the rest of the script and get everything locked in'. So she called me back a day later and said 'Cameron Diaz is doing the movie'.
"She said she thought me and Cameron could get together, they'd give us a list and we could meet with all these directors. Apparently Emma had called Cameron and said 'Ashton's doing the movie,', so she sort of lied to both of us, telling both of us that we had both agreed to do the movie.
"I called Cameron 'alright, let's sit down and talk about the movie,'. We got together and I said 'so you agreed to do it?', and she was like 'I thought you agreed to do it,’ but by then we were already there and we had a good conversation and said this could be fun."
With British director Tom Vaughan following up his success on Starter For Ten with his first foray into Hollywood, the result is a crowd pleasing box office hit. As for Kutcher's immediate future, he is slated to produce half a dozen new movies, though as he expands into darker, more dramatic territory he will not be deserting the comedy themed films with which he made his name.
"It takes a lot of energy to be funny," he states, "it does for me, anyway. I feel like I work twice as hard. I didn't know if I was ready for that again, but doing What Happens In Vegas really changed my whole perspective on making movies because I had fun; every single day I had a really good time." You can almost feel the love, as Kutcher’s honeymoon period with the most engaging genre in cinema is far from over.
ANWAR BRETT
Back to Editor's Extra
|
