Ashton Kutcher reflected recently on his eight-year marriage to Demi Moore and being a stepdad in his mid-20s to her three young girls.
"I was 26, bearing the responsibility of an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old. That’s how some teen parents must experience their twenties," the "That '70s Show" star told Esquire in an interview published Tuesday. "They were awesome then and they’re awesome now."
The couple also lost a baby late in Moore’s pregnancy and struggled to conceive via IVF. She was also battling a drinking problem. Kutcher admitted altogether it was "a lot."
"Losing a kid that you think you’re going to have, and that close to thinking you’re going to have a kid, is really, really painful," he said of the miscarriage. "Everyone deals with that in different ways."
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He continued, "I love kids. I wouldn’t have gotten married to a woman that had three kids if I didn’t love kids. The idea of having another kid would have been incredible. For whatever reason, I had to have that experience."
Kutcher and Moore divorced in 2013.
"Nothing makes you feel like a failure like divorce," Kutcher admitted. "Divorce feels like a wholesale f---ing failure. You failed at marriage."
However, he said he has tried to learn to "own" what he has done wrong and "move forward," according to the interview, which notes Kutcher's "tattered" reputation at the time over his alleged infidelity.
He admitted that he was "f---ing pissed" when Moore published her 2019 memoir, which brought back a torrent of paparazzi scrutiny to his newly quiet life but said he did not want to "open anything up in that realm."
"I'd finally gotten to a place where the press had really laid off me and [wife] Mila [Kunis], and my life and my family. And then the next day, [the paparazzi] are at my kids' school," Kutcher explained. He shared that he does not have any ill will toward Moore herself though.
Two years after his divorce in 2013, he married Kunis, who was also his costar on "That 70s Show."
"The thing about Mila that made our relationship accelerate was that I had always admired her," he said. "Her talents, her skills, her gifts. But I knew that she didn’t need me. And she knew that I didn’t need her."
The couple now have two children: Wyatt, 8, and Dimitri, 6, together.
"I have young kids, and I like my kids a lot," Kutcher explained of asking filmmakers to move the production of his new movie "Your Place or Mine" from Georgia to Los Angeles, saying they could take the Peach State tax break losses out of his salary. "I like spending time with them."
Kutcher and Kunis are also working together again with cameos of their former ‘70s characters on "That ‘90s Show." He claimed she insisted.
"‘You know, we owe our entire careers to this show. It doesn’t matter what the script is, we’re doing it,’" Kutcher said Kunis told him, although he already wanted to do it.
"I feel so lucky," he reflected on his career. "And when you feel that lucky and fortunate and you have some self-awareness, you realize you didn’t do it on your own. I didn’t do any of this on my own."
