In the mid-2000s, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher were among the most talked about couples in Hollywood.
The couple went public with their relationship in 2003 and tied the knot in 2005 when Demi was 42 and Ashton was 27. Their age difference of 15 years has been the focus of many public conversations.
Despite a heartbreaking pregnancy loss in 2006, Ashton and Demi enjoyed a happy marriage, with the punk’d star developing close relationships with Demi’s three daughters with ex-husband Bruce Willis.
However, things finally fell apart in 2010 when the couple was first dogged by rumors that Ashton had been cheating. They initially formed a united front, but announced their split in November 2011.
Though claims of Ashton’s infidelity were rife, Demi only addressed the demise of their relationship in detail in 2019, writing in her memoir that he had cheated twice — once with a 21-year-old he met during a family trip to one bowling alley.
The Ghost star claimed Ashton tried to justify his actions by saying the lines of their marriage had been blurred by the fact that they had had a threesome in the past.
Just two months after he and Demi announced their divorce, Ashton had already reconnected with his longtime girlfriend and former That 70s Show co-star Mila Kunis, and the two bonded at a party at his home in January 2012 an offscreen kiss for the first time.
Mila and Ashton have both claimed on separate occasions that their romantic relationship started as a purely casual affair as they were both newly single at the time.
But as history goes, things got serious pretty quickly, and the two had moved in together in April 2012, more than a year before Demi and Ashton’s divorce was even finalized.
Of course, Ashton and Mila are now very happily married and share two children, Wyatt and Dimitri, aged 8 and 6. However, in a brand new interview, Ashton looks back at how he and Mila tackled the issue with his and Demi’s rocky marriage in the early days of their romance.
Speaking to Esquire, Ashton looked back on the pain of his divorce from Demi, particularly the shame he felt after his cheating scandal broke.
“Nothing makes you feel like a failure like a divorce,” he said. “Divorce feels like a total failure. You have failed in marriage.”
He recalled instances at industry events where he had heard people discuss the rumors of his infidelity, calling the experience “humiliating and embarrassing.”
Reflecting on the demise of their marriage and the part he had played in the demise, Ashton simply said, “You own the shit you did wrong and you move on.”
With his behavior being the talk of the town, Ashton’s close friends were apparently not exempt from hearing about his private antics – including Mila.
Ashton went on to talk about how they went from old friends to lovers following his split from Demi, and admitted his behavior was something that spoke directly to Mila.
“You were an asshole,” he recalled her saying to him, prompting a self-reflection.
“Yes, you were an asshole for a good two years,” she apparently added.
And while it might have hurt to be met with such brutal honesty by one of his longtime friends, Mila’s frankness ultimately served Ashton’s best.
“What accelerated our relationship about Mila was that I had always admired her,” he said, looking back on their rapidly evolving romance. “Their talents, their skills, their gifts. But I knew she didn’t need me. And she knew I didn’t need her.”
He added that one of the most important aspects of their relationship was their ability to accept each other’s flaws.
In the past, Mila has spoken openly about how she “fucked up” ending her nine-year relationship with Macaulay Culkin, which she admitted led to a “horrible, horrible, horrible breakup.”
She has never spoken explicitly about infidelity, but she told Dax Shepard in 2018, “I screwed up. I was an asshole in my 20s and I’ll be the first to admit it. And that’s kind of something that took me a long time to come out and say, ‘Yeah, you know what? I was an ass and I accept it. And now I own it.”
Perhaps alluding to these similarities from their previous relationships, Ashton said he and Mila were able to bond so quickly because they “already knew each other’s dirt.”
Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, Ashton also offered a rare comment on Demi’s all-encompassing memoir, released in 2019, which was full of details about their tumultuous marriage.
Apparently reluctant to delve further into his thoughts on the book, Ashton said he was “freaking pissed off” at the release of his ex’s memoir and admitted his frustration was mostly centered on his family’s privacy.
“I had finally gotten to a point where the press had really dismissed me and Mila and my life and my family. And then the next day [the paparazzi] are in my kids’ school,” he said, adding decisively, “I don’t want to open anything in that area.”
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