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Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher has spent much of his career playing with the gap between confidence and cluelessness. His relaxed charm and willingness to look ridiculous made Michael Kelso a defining part of That ’70s Show, where Kutcher appeared from 1998 to 2006. It was a role built around comic vanity, bad ideas and impeccable self-belief, and it established the screen persona that carried him into movies. Born on February 7, 1978, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Kutcher developed an interest in acting during high school and appeared in school plays. He later attended the University of Iowa with plans to study biochemical engineering, but a modeling competition helped redirect his path. After modeling work in New York, Paris and Milan, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. His early film career leaned heavily into comedy. Dude, Where’s My Car?, Just Married and Guess Who all drew on his talent for playing men whose confidence runs well ahead of their judgment. Even his appearance in Cheaper by the Dozen, as a self-absorbed actor, made use of that same instinct. The Butterfly Effect offered a deliberate change of tone, casting him as a conflicted young man whose attempts to alter the past carry increasingly difficult consequences. Kutcher also understood television as something to shape, not simply appear in. In 2003, he produced and hosted MTV’s Punk’d, a hidden-camera series built around elaborate tricks on celebrities. His production work later extended to reality shows including Beauty and the Geek and Opportunity Knocks. He returned to sitcom prominence in 2011 as Walden Schmidt on Two and a Half Men, then played Colt Bennett, a former semi-professional football player returning to his family’s Colorado ranch, in Netflix’s The Ranch from 2016 to 2020. Alongside acting and producing, Kutcher has pursued restaurant ventures and extensive technology investment, including co-founding A-Grade Investments and announcing Sound Ventures as its successor. It is an unusually broad career, but the through line remains clear: an eagerness to move between comedy, drama, production and business without staying in one lane for long.