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"  Earlier this year, Ashton Kutcher attended a memorable party in Beverly Hills accompanied by his girlfriend, the actress Mila Kunis. It was a sixtieth-birthday party for Bran Ferren, the cofounder of a laboratory called Applied Minds, attended by a who&amp;#039;s who of superrich nerds, including Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons), Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari and creator of Pong), and Bob Metcalfe (who invented the Ethernet). What was the conversation like? &amp;quot;We were talking about circular polarization versus vertical polarization,&amp;quot; Kutcher says. &amp;quot;If a polarized wave is moving in a clockwise direction and it bounces off something, it will immediately reverse to moving counterclockwise. We were talking about that as it relates to transmission of radio frequency.&amp;quot; Um, what? Kutcher, 35, takes a breath, then smiles. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I can explain it. Basically, every single person at the table\u2014including my girlfriend\u2014was smarter than me.&amp;quot; Did the subject of Two and a Half Men even come up? &amp;quot;Not necessarily applicable information for all surroundings,&amp;quot; he says. Kutcher is a riddle wrapped in a really handsome enigma. He&amp;#039;s a onetime model who&amp;#039;s made a career of playing lovable boneheads and jokesters (That &amp;#039;70s Show; the underrated No Strings Attached); the alpha bro who once tweeted a photo of then wife Demi Moore ironing his clothes while dressed in nothing but a white bikini; the prankster who punk&amp;#039;d Kim Kardashian into thinking she&amp;#039;d blown up a gas station. Yet he&amp;#039;s also the guy who, long before Justin Timberlake slapped his name on MySpace or Will.i.am launched his own iPhone accessories, had proven to be something of a tech savant. Kutcher was an early investor in Skype (the company was valued at $2.75 billion when he got in; it later sold for $8.5 billion) and, through his investment firm, A-Grade\u2014a partnership with Madonna&amp;#039;s manager, Guy Oseary, and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle\u2014has his hand in a string of hip, inventive start-ups, including the music site Spotify and the couch-surfing tool Airbnb. Early this summer, Kutcher will take a make-or-break professional leap that could, for the first time, publicly fuse his dual personas\u2014playing the most recognizable genius of our time in jOBS, a hotly anticipated biopic about the late founder of Apple. Would the real Ashton Kutcher please log on? On the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, where Two and a Half Men shoots, Kutcher&amp;#039;s trailer is a two-story behemoth that looks more like something out of Transformers 3 than a dressing room. Wearing faded jeans and a gray T-shirt, the actor emerges from this sanctuary squinting in the sunlight, a wad of chewing tobacco tucked behind his lower lip. &amp;quot;Want to get a coffee?&amp;quot; he asks. In 2011, when Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre first brought Kutcher in to replace a postmeltdown Charlie Sheen\u2014a gamble that has paid off, with the show averaging a very solid (if slightly down) 14 million weekly viewers\u2014he envisioned Kutcher&amp;#039;s character as a rock star with a massive entourage. &amp;quot;There was an impression that I was this sort of larger-than-life, with-a-posse kind of guy,&amp;quot; Kutcher says. &amp;quot;After we met and hung out, he realized I was just a geek.&amp;quot; Lorre concurs: &amp;quot;The decadent celebrity approach suddenly felt vaguely Jurassic after meeting Ashton. He&amp;#039;s far more sophisticated, and I wanted his character on the show to reflect that.&amp;quot; Thus Walden Schmidt was reconceived as a wealthy Internet entrepreneur\u2014a skin that fit the actor better in more ways than one. (For the record, Kutcher earns a rumored $800,000 an episode and has a net worth of more than $140 million.) Kutcher started seriously investing in tech five years ago, around the time he beat CNN in a very public race to become the first Twitter entity to attract a million followers. In terms of identifying emerging companies worthy of seed money Kutcher is known for being way ahead of the pack. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m highly competitive,&amp;quot; Oseary says, &amp;quot;and I used to want to kick his ass. Every great deal\u2014by the time I could figure it out, he was already there. He&amp;#039;s identified things that were only ideas on a napkin.&amp;quot; So instead of trying to beat Kutcher, Oseary raised $15 million to get A-Grade off the ground, and joined forces with him. &amp;quot;When it comes to the Internet,&amp;quot; Oseary admits, &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s no beating Ashton.&amp;quot; No matter how authentic Kutcher&amp;#039;s Silicon Valley cred\u2014or how startling his physical resemblance to a &amp;#039;70s-era Steve Jobs\u2014neither qualification could stem the tide of vitriol that followed his landing the meaty, highly coveted lead in jOBS. (Vanity Fair\u2009&amp;#039;s website titled its post on the subject &amp;quot;How to Handle the News of Ashton Kutcher Being Cast as Steve Jobs Without Giving Up on Hollywood.&amp;quot;) &amp;quot;Jobs is such a present and iconic figure, there would have been push back with whoever you cast,&amp;quot; insists the film&amp;#039;s director, Joshua Michael Stern. Kutcher puts it plainly: &amp;quot;It was something I was scared to do. That indicated to me that it was a good thing.&amp;quot; The resemblance between the two men, it turns out, ran more than skin-deep. Both were college dropouts and the sons of men who worked with their hands\u2014Kutcher&amp;#039;s father was a carpenter in Iowa; Jobs&amp;#039; was a mechanic in Palo Alto. And both were inveterate pranksters. Before inventing the personal computer in 1976, Jobs and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak punk&amp;#039;d the phone companies\u2014big-time\u2014by marketing an illegal device that allowed people to make international calls for free. But perhaps most importantly, both Kutcher and Jobs persevered despite being thoroughly underestimated. When Jobs opened the first Apple store in 2001, BusinessWeek ran a story with the headline &amp;quot;Sorry, Steve: Here&amp;#039;s Why Apple Stores Won&amp;#039;t Work.&amp;quot; As for Kutcher, he says he&amp;#039;s learned to use people&amp;#039;s low expectations to his advantage. &amp;quot;People fill in the blanks really fast. They go, &amp;#039;Oh my God, he&amp;#039;s on a show and [plays] stupid, so he must be stupid,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t control that, nor do I try to, nor do I want to.&amp;quot; Arguably, he&amp;#039;s the one who perpetuates the misconception. No one on a mission to be taken seriously would have signed on for the ubiquitous Nikon ad campaign in which Kutcher impishly spies on a bevy of hot young women, as though confirming\u2014ironically?\u2014all of the long-standing assumptions about him: that he is droll and delightful, yes; easy on the eyes, for sure; but a lightweight. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s something advantageous about having people underestimate your intellect, insomuch as a lot of things are revealed to you. They assume you don&amp;#039;t know what you&amp;#039;re talking about, then all of a sudden, you do. And the next thing you know, you have information you wouldn&amp;#039;t normally have.&amp;quot;  The film tracks Jobs from his LSD days at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, to his start as a video-game designer at Atari, all the way through his ousting from and subsequent triumphant return to Apple. Kutcher prepared by studying some 200 hours of footage, from Jobs&amp;#039; keynote speeches to rare television interviews. On set, he stayed in character between shots; he even landed in the hospital for two days after losing 20 pounds on the fruitarian diet that Jobs followed (whence, it is said, comes the name Apple). Stern recalls filming at Jobs&amp;#039; actual childhood home in the Bay Area, in the famous garage where Apple was born. &amp;quot;Ashton was soaking it all in a quiet way,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was his house.&amp;quot; Kutcher is proud of the work, and for good reason. The film isn&amp;#039;t perfect, but when Kutcher&amp;#039;s Jobs stares at himself in a mirror after feverishly denying paternity of his child (Jobs eventually acknowledged the daughter, born to an ex-girlfriend), the actor displays a gravitas previously unseen beneath the rom-com veneer. Sure, he mastered Jobs&amp;#039; slouched shuffle, as well as his speech patterns and mannerisms (it&amp;#039;s as if every word he speaks is part of a TED talk), but the real trick is how Kutcher wields his innate charm in a new way: Despite his renowned prickliness, Jobs had the charisma of a visionary, and Kutcher sells that aspect as convincingly as Jobs himself once sold each new iteration of his iPhone. Kutcher shows us why so many people deified Jobs. And if the film succeeds\u2014 despite a script that at times can feel like a bullet-point overview of its subject&amp;#039;s biography rather than an in-depth psychological probing\u2014it&amp;#039;s because of its star. Still, well before it hit theaters, jOBS was the subject of controversy. Though early reviews after its January premiere at Sundance were positive about Kutcher&amp;#039;s performance (if tinged with schadenfreude), when EW.com posted a 60-second clip of the movie, Wozniak immediately decried many of the film&amp;#039;s plot points as inaccurate. (We&amp;#039;ll get his version of events in the next Steve Jobs film, currently in development at Sony; Wozniak is a consultant on that project, written by Aaron Sorkin and based on the celebrated Walter Isaacson bio of Jobs.) If nothing else, jOBS will answer the question: Can Ashton Kutcher have a career beyond playing the fool? He can\u2014if that&amp;#039;s even what he wants. &amp;quot;There was a point in time where I was doing movies to be able to afford to live in a certain way,&amp;quot; says the man whose oeuvre includes films in which he cups a woman&amp;#039;s breast and passes it off as a DIY mammogram (My Boss&amp;#039;s Daughter), urinates in a sink full of dirty dishes (What Happens in Vegas), and misplaces his automobile (Dude, Where&amp;#039;s My Car?). And going for a certain kind of gold worked: The first house he bought in Los Angeles had a two-story wine tower; today, he is rich enough to indulge any man-child whims\u2014he recently became the 500th paying customer on Richard Branson&amp;#039;s Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, putting down a $20,000 deposit on a ticket to outer space. &amp;quot;You know, I didn&amp;#039;t really go the starving-artist route. I kind of went and did massive, commercial things. [Two and a Half Men] is a very commercial show. But it&amp;#039;s very fun to do. I&amp;#039;m surrounded by an amazing group of people. And I can be home for dinner.&amp;quot; Where and with whom he&amp;#039;s eating dinner, well, that&amp;#039;s a matter of absurdly high public interest these days. Talk about being underestimated: When he and Moore started dating in 2003, at the respective ages of 25 and 40, their relationship was viewed as a curiosity. Here was evidence of the Cougar in her natural habitat! In 2005, the couple married in a kabbalah ceremony and embarked upon a next-level kind of new normal, hanging with Moore&amp;#039;s ex Bruce Willis and altogether redefining the blended family. It was so copacetic that Moore&amp;#039;s three children reportedly referred to Kutcher as MOD\u2014My Other Dad. After six years of marriage, they separated in November 2011. Kutcher formally filed for divorce in December 2012, and though he&amp;#039;s not elaborating on the details, it seems clear that he&amp;#039;s moved on. He bought a slick steel-and-glass home with views of Lake Hollywood last April, for upward of $10.8 million\u2014a house he found, naturally, on Airbnb. And, after eight months together, he took Kunis home to Cedar Rapids to spend Christmas with his family. Throughout the courtship, Kutcher has been unusually circumspect\u2014noticeably different from the guy who, appearing on ABC&amp;#039;s Nightline in 2010, claimed that he and Moore could control tabloid headlines by tweeting their personal photos themselves. (Like the time she posted a picture of her arm with the words &amp;quot;Race U to the bedroom&amp;quot; written on it.) &amp;quot;You know, I&amp;#039;ve learned the hard way how valuable privacy is,&amp;quot; he says now. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;ve learned that there are a lot of things in your life that really benefit from being private. And relationships are one of them. And I am going to do everything in my power to have this relationship be private.&amp;quot; One of those hard lessons, presumably, was his well-documented 2011 tryst at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego with a 22-year-old insurance-company administrative assistant, who quickly sold her story to a tabloid. When the subject of privacy arises, it seems pretty clear that the experience left a mark: &amp;quot;When you become well known, you start to have suspicions about people&amp;#039;s intentions that you&amp;#039;re becoming close with. Because I think there&amp;#039;s been an artificial value that&amp;#039;s been put on fame in the world\u2014people don&amp;#039;t want to do something. They just want to be famous. And so I think you develop a natural suspicion of that. And, you know, I have a little bit of na\u00EFvet\u00E9 about trusting people\u2014with the notion that if you share and if you give to people, they&amp;#039;ll respect your privacy in turn. Unfortunately, that&amp;#039;s not the case.&amp;quot; Kutcher and Kunis met when they were cast as Kelso and Jackie, a gorgeous teen numskull and his prima donna girlfriend, in That &amp;#039;70s Show; he was 20, she was 15. Are they like high school friends who later realize love was right in front of them all along? &amp;quot;People will fill in the blanks however they want,&amp;quot; he says. As for what his relationship with Moore&amp;#039;s children is like these days, he says, steely eyed: &amp;quot;There are some things that are better left private.&amp;quot; Kutcher sips his iced coffee and reflects for a moment. &amp;quot;Someone once told me, &amp;#039;If anyone wants to be rich and famous, let them be rich first and see if they still want to be famous.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Liked this article? Get it first when you subscribe to ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a13771/ashton-kutcher-on-steve-jobs-interview/?link=rel&dom=yah_omg&src=syn&mag=elm>