Ashton Kutcher

From playing one half of the witless heroes of Dude Where’s My Car?, Ashton Kutcher has appeared in other romantic comedies such as Just Married, A Lot Like Love and Guess Who?. He also starred in the suspense tale The Butterfly Effect, and has roles in the soon to be released films Open Season and Bobby.

In addition to his movie work he was one of the lead actors in That 70s Show, and was producer and host of MTV’s Candid Camera style Punk’d.

In The Guardian he plays Jake Fischer, a talented swimming champion who is one of several candidates up for selection to the US Coast Guard’s elite rescue swimmers. This brings him into direct conflict with tough but inspirational instructor Ben Randall (Kevin Costner). Andrew Davis directs.

With all the preparation you did for your work on The Guardian, is this the fittest you’ve ever been for a role?

It’s the fittest I’ve ever been in my life. I feel like when you’re doing a film the idea is that you do all the work before you get there. Everything that you’re going to do in a scene, everything that you’re going to have to do physically, you have to have the work already done before you arrive. There are going to be enough problems once you get there that you’re going to have to solve, so if you haven’t already figured out what you’re going to do you’re not going to win. I started training for the movie before I knew I had the role, I was training for about eight months, which involved a lot of swimming.

Did you like to swim before?

I don’t like the water, I didn’t like taking a bath really. I spent a lot of time swimming. I had to basically learn how to in order to do the film, and then just training beyond that and training as an actor, just to get better.

And what about your diet, did you have to change much of what you ate?

I lived on chicken, broccoli and brown rice for the last three months of training. With my trainer I went to see this [swim] school and these guys were all built in a way that I’d never even thought about being built. I said ‘I don’t look like one of them yet, I need to look like one of them’. And he said ‘well alright here’s what you’re going to do, you’re going to change what you’re going to eat’. So it was chicken, broccoli and brown rice. I could go without eating that again for a while.

Have you kept up your healthy regime?

No.

Did you give up smoking and drinking for the film?

I gave up smoking, I never gave up the drinking. When I was training, it’s hard to smoke and swim at the same time. You’d get to the edge of the pool and all you’d be wanting is a cigarette when all you actually really want is oxygen. So I traded the smoke for the oxygen. I read a book by an author named Allen Carr, The Easy Way To Stop Smoking, and the great thing about the book is that you get to smoke while you’re reading it. You get to page five and it says something like ‘light one up now,’ and you say ‘absolutely!’. And you get to the end of the book and the last page says ‘smoke your last cigarette’. You do, and I did and I haven’t smoked since. That’s one thing that I haven’t returned to. And I took, I think a three month break from working out when I finished the movie, I couldn’t motivate myself to get into the gym or swim. I’ve done some swimming since but not a whole lot.

Is it true you got to put your life saving skills to use some time after making the film?

I was on holiday in Turkey with some English friends of ours. There was one older gentleman, he’s like an 80 year old doctor and he’d been drinking pretty much all day. He decided to go for a swim and got about ten feet away from the boat and started to go under. So I just pulled him back to the boat, which wasn’t too difficult a task.

But you’d have never have even contemplated that before making The Guardian, would you?

Before doing the film I wouldn’t have been quite so quick to get in the water, for myself. I really couldn’t swim. I could probably make it from here to that post [a few feet away] and back, and I wouldn’t have looked good doing it.

Did you learn much from working with Kevin Costner on the film?

I always feel like you’re not growing as a person unless you’re doing something that makes you a little uncomfortable. I want to grow as a person, so when it came time I was training and training for the movie. We were about two months away and the trainer said he hadn’t heard from Kevin. I said ‘he’s not swimming yet?’. I started to think about Dustin Hoffman doing Marathon Man with Laurence Olivier, and Dustin was running around the track until he passed out and Olivier was standing over him and says ‘it’s called acting my boy’. So the whole movie I kept waiting for Kevin to come up to me and just go ‘it’s called acting my boy’. But it never happened. He got in decent shape for the film, and I learned a lot from him, not necessarily about being in the water but about being a man, and about relating with people, about being a generous person and a generous actor.

Weren’t you a big fan of his as a kid?

His movie Field of Dreams was filmed in Iowa, and I grew up with a cornfield in my backyard and always thought a baseball player was going to walk out of it. I’m very fortunate to have met a lot of my acting heroes. They become your teachers and your team-mates, your bodyguards or authoritative figure. Now Kevin is my friend.

Your wife, Demi Moore, underwent a physically gruelling training regime on GI Jane – did she give you any tips of surviving yours?

She said to just go all out. She told me that she did everything and by the time they started shooting, because they really respected her for giving everything, they supported her. That was really great advice because I went in on the first day of the boot camp and said ‘alright keep up with me’, because I said I was going all out. What it did was it created a unity between myself and the other guys that are in the movie. They took it seriously. And with them taking it seriously I think the movie got better because of it. And the Coast Guard guys, man, they were there for me. Any question I had, anything I needed to know, they had my back.

How did you feel upon learning some of your co-stars playing members of the Coast Guard were Olympic standard swimmers?

You know, I really thought I was there. I went through the whole Coast Guard manual, and made sure I could do everything that those guys could do, what they have to do in order to graduate. I got to Louisiana and Andy [Davis, director] said ‘well that’s great, so you really think you’re ready?’ and I was like ‘yeah, I’m ready, I’m going to blow these guys away’. Then he said he’d show me who the other guys are, and he throws down a picture of Mark Gangloff who won a gold medal in Athens in the swimming and I was like ‘man you’ve got to be kidding me!’.

In the end you showed your mettle though, didn’t you?

Once we got the gear on and started doing the tows and stuff they slowed down a little bit because it’s a different kind of swimming when you’re dragging somebody else through the water. Those guys can make it across the pool in eight strokes. But once you get the gear on it’s like pulling a big parachute so you don’t have the glide, and the form becomes less essential.

Although every care was obviously taken, there must have been dangers involved in the making of the film, wasn’t there?

Yeah, to me a dangerous situation is when you realise what could happen. Now, looking back, I think about hanging 80 feet above the concrete on a thin little wire controlled by some guy with a winch. If you think about what could happen, I remember hanging from there after we did it two or three times. Kevin said ‘maybe you guys could put a little fall pad down there in case…….’ but from where we were hanging it looked [tiny]. I wondered how we were going to hit that as we were swinging around in the wind and the rain. So yeah, there were definitely some dangerous situations.

How long were you underwater for?

That’s the one thing about the movie that really ticks me off because I was under the water for about three and a half minutes, holding my breath after swimming the length of the pool but when they cut it in the movie it’s about 20 seconds, if that. So I kind of look at a lot of the things that I did and I wonder what the hell did I do that for, but you live and you learn.

The guys you were playing are in danger so much of the time, did the film give you a new found respect for the Coast Guard?

You have to respect anybody who is willing to sacrifice their life to save the life of a complete stranger, if you don’t you’re a fool. That’s what these guys do on a daily basis. I also appreciate the fact that there’s a branch of the military supported by the United States government that is trained to save lives not to take them. I think that’s a really noble thing. And in regards to the acting, I don’t regret anything that I did to train for the movie, I knew that I wanted to portray them as who they are. That meant creating a physique for myself that resembled theirs, and if I got into a little bit better shape than I needed to, that’s not a bad thing. If I’m playing a heroin addict, I’m not going to do heroin, I can guarantee you that.

They must be pleased with the increased profile the film has given them [coastguards not herion addicts!], aren’t they?

They are, they actually had recruiting tables set up in Chicago at the opening of the film, and I think they actually got quite a few people to sign up. I don’t necessarily want to make a recruiting film, but if it helps them that’s a good thing.

Having made your mark in comedies this is a fully fledged graduation to a dramatic story. Have you any preference regarding the genre you work in?

You know the films that have made me feel the best have been the ones that have had a story I’ve wanted to tell. As an actor, when you’re starting off, you don’t necessarily get to choose that much. You kind of do what you’re given. You have limited choices, and as my choices have grown I’ve been able to tell the stories that I like to tell, about people that I respect, or a story that has a message I believe in. Those are the kind of films I want to make, and whether that’s a comedy or an action film or a drama, or a horror film or a western – whatever it is – those are the kind of movies I want to make.

Do you think your mischeivous reputation from doing Punk'd raises problems or concerns for your co-stars?

I don’t guarantee immunity, when I’m working with someone I’m not going to break that trust that you have to have. You have to be able to look across to the person that you’re working with and trust them, and trust that they’re going to give it everything they’ve got. I can’t break that trust in my work. So if they do I hope that they know while we’re working together that nothing will happen.

Did Kevin ever have doubts?

I think he just knew that that wasn’t going to be the case. When you’re hanging from the wires you have all this concrete and rebarb, if something’s going wrong you don’t want the guy going ‘are you punking me?’. ‘No, you’re really going to die!’. You don’t want to get caught in that situation, so I would never do that.