Ashton Kutcher's journey from goofball to gigolo

Not many guys have successfully made the transition from male model to movie star. Ashton Kutcher accomplished it with his chiseled good looks and, even more, his irrepressible personality.

During a career arc from the sitcom That '70s Show to films such as Dude, Where's My Car? and What Happens in Vegas, he's established an identity as a scattered but lovable goofball.

That image gets a drastic makeover with Spread, the dark and daring R-rated film opening tomorrow. Kutcher stars as Nikki, a young Los Angeles gigolo on the prowl for a sugarcougar who will provide him with the pampered lifestyle to which he'd like to become accustomed.

"It's definitely a different kind of character," he says during a phone interview. "In a lot of the more commercial films that I've done, my characters have had a little less dirt on them. It's fun to play morally compromised people.

"This guy doesn't look at dating as a fun thing. He looks at it as a means to an end. It's Machiavellian, with a little more of an agenda."

To play Nikki, a calculating ladykiller, Kutcher says, "I did observational research. I've been out to the clubs in L.A. a couple of times."

A couple of times? The general presumption is that he's out clubbing every night. And it ain't research.

"If people actually knew what my day-to-day life was, I think they would be shocked," says Kutcher, who married actress Demi Moore in 2005, becoming stepfather to her three daughters. "On an average day, I wake up; I take my kids to school; I go to the office; I work on projects, study my material, read scripts. I go home, have dinner with my family, I watch a little TV, and then I go to bed."

His costar in Spread, Margarita Levieva, confirms his focused approach to life - and to his thriving production company, Katalyst.

"I was really surprised because of the conceptions people have of him," she says. "He's constantly working on something. He'd be reading scripts he has in development in his trailer. There was never a moment when he had any downtime."

So why does a workaholic and devoted family man still have a reputation as a playboy of the Western world? (His flirty ad campaign for Canon cameras is doubtless a contributing factor.)

"I think there's a lot of carryover from when I was single and out a little more," says the actor, still boyish at 31.

Those early wilder years probably helped him bring Spread's seducer to life.

His Nikki is convincing, right down to his jaunty, suspendered wardrobe.

"I was trying to create a look for the character that was unique to him," he says. "The motivation for the suspenders is that these [pick-up artists], when they go out to a nightclub, there's a sort of rule about peacocking. You want to be noticed in the crowd."

One suspects that Nikki is the protagonist's working name. So is Ashton. The Iowa native, born Christopher Ashton Kutcher, assumed his middle name after he moved to New York at 19 to break into the modeling world.

"There were two people with the name Chris at my modeling agency, and we looked very similar. My agent got annoyed," Kutcher says, "because she would get calls trying to book Chris and she never knew who it was they wanted. She asked if I had a nickname or middle name and when I told her, she said, 'Now your name is Ashton.' "

He kept it when he moved to Los Angeles a year later, immediately landing the role of the dim but sexy Kelso on That '70s Show.

He hasn't slowed down since, although he's changed gears a few times. After conquering the small and big screens, Kutcher is now a monumental star on the computer screen, as the King of Twitter.

He posts short, personal updates, links, even pictures (including a rather revelatory shot of his wife's derriere) as often as five times a day on the social networking site. His handle: APLUSK. He now has more than three million followers on Twitter.

With all he has accomplished, Kutcher is still perhaps most associated with Punk'd, the series he created that pranked celebrities while filming them with hidden cameras. It ran for four years on MTV.

"What's weird to me is for a good while, anytime I would be anywhere, people would start looking around to see if something was going down," says the Punk'd provocateur. "I would walk in a room and people wouldn't want to say anything; they'd be on pins and needles wondering if they were on camera."

We gave Ashton Kutcher a sort of verbal Rorschach test, firing a series of set-ups at him and asking him to fill in the blanks. Here are his snap responses:

The best part of fame is: Access.

I'm talking to you but I'm thinking about: Football.

If I wasn't in show biz, I'd be: Going to school.

The thing I miss most about Iowa is: My mom.

In high school I would have been voted: Most likely to be making a fool out of myself.

One thing I'd never order in a restaurant is: Pork.

What was God thinking when he created: Man.

In my next life I'd like to come back as: Me.

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