Ashton Kutcher is known for his comedic roles in movies and his playful, goofy persona in real life. The actor rose to fame following his gig as Michael Kelso in “That ’70s Show,” and as the mastermind behind pranking the most beloved celebrities on MTV’s “Punk’d.” While he has largely maintained a career based around joy and laughter, behind the scenes, he has dedicated his time to some serious causes.
In 2012, Kutcher and then-wife Demi Moore launched Thorn, a non-profit organization that aims to protect children from sexual exploitation through the use of technology, per its official website.
Thorn is a cause close to Kutcher, and in 2017, he testified in front of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee to bring light to his efforts, dubbing it “one of the greatest honors of [his] life” (via CNN). Alongside Thorn, Kutcher is also dedicated to helping the war-stricken Ukraine.
The actor’s now-wife, Mila Kunis, was born and raised in Ukraine, before moving to the United States when she was eight years old. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kutcher and Kunis set up a GoFundMe to help provide immediate support to the country. As of this writing, they have raised over $22 million.
While Kutcher uses his celeb platform to make the world a better place by helping to stop some of the biggest problems and tragedies, in his personal life, he has experienced his own share of hardships. Here are tragic details about Ashton Kutcher’s life.
A divorce can be difficult for children of any age, let alone a teenager. When Ashton Kutcher was 13 years old, his parents — Larry and Diane Kutcher — ended their marriage. Following the divorce, Ashton and his siblings, twin brother Michael and older sister Tausha Kutcher, lived with their mother and eventually relocated to Homestead, Iowa, per Biography.
Though Ashton has not publicly gone into much detail about his parents’ divorce, he did touch briefly on it in a 2017 acceptance speech for the Robert D. Ray Pillar of Character Award at his home state’s Drake University. Discussing his own journey as a parent, he tearfully said in part (via the Des Moines Register), “When [my wife and I] had these kids … my first response was, I wanted to call my parents and say, ‘I’m sorry, because I never knew how much you loved me.’”
He additionally mentioned his own divorce from Demi Moore and how the event broadened his understanding of his mom and dad’s experience. “I had the great fortune of getting a divorce, because I felt the impact of it, and I felt how much loss is in there and how much love is in there, and that it’s not neat or clean or messy,” he said. “And I understood, finally, my parents’ divorce in a whole different way.”
While also dealing with the fallout of his parents’ divorce, Ashton Kutcher also dealt with constant stress amid twin brother Michael Kutcher’s ongoing health struggle. According to Michael’s website, he had a troublesome birth and was “notably smaller” than his twin, Christopher (better known to the world as Ashton).
As reported by Today, Michael was born with underdeveloped lungs, couldn’t breathe on his own, and weighed in at only four pounds at the time, compared to Ashton, who was born as a healthy 11-pound baby. In his toddler years, Michael explained, he experienced “developmental delays” that affected his motor skills, speech, and vision, which made mom Diane Kutcher take him to see a doctor. He would receive his Cerebral Palsy diagnosis at three years old.
When the Kutcher twins turned 13, however, things became increasingly more stressful, as Michael experienced heart failure. Along with the grim diagnosis, he was only expected to live three or four weeks. Thankfully, a heart transplant allowed Michael to survive, and he has since used his experience to advocate for disability (or #Diffability) awareness with organizations like The Cerebral Palsy Foundation.
But while growing up, Ashton was very protective of his brother, often standing up against Michael’s bullies or refraining from hangouts if he wasn’t also invited. As Michael told Today, his twin didn’t want to see him struggle in any way, adding, “Chris would tell me, ‘I wish I could take all of this off of you — and take it myself.’”
