Jobs role a full-on commitment
Kutcher did his best to follow icon’s diet regimen,
Playing the brilliant but flawed Steve Jobs in the film biopic Jobs was a full-on commitment for Ashton Kutcher. And while the highprofile actor may not be as smart or as socially dysfunctional as the Apple boss, he appreciated the turmoil he went through after losing what he loved — his company.
“The only way to relate to something like that is to have some version in your own life and I’ve had that and could relate to it,” said Kutcher, 35, at a Manhattan hotel suite, although he wouldn’t elaborate.
The film, in theatres Aug. 16, opens with Kutcher’s Jobs presenting the iPod to a devoted audience in 2001 then flashes back to his early years as a California college dropout searching for a reason to be.
The profile tracks Jobs from those days to his iPod breakthrough. So we see him as a rebellious LSD-taking subversive and in his early development phase as an arrogant employee at a video-game manufacturer in the Silicon Valley.
Later, he joins forces with genius buddy Steve Wozniak (played by Josh Gad) to construct the first Apple computer kit in Jobs’s parents’ garage, which in turn leads to Apple II and the formation of the corporation, which made both Jobs and Wozniak multimillionaires.
Included, too, are the betrayals, the sneaky boardroom manoeuvring and the eventual purge that saw Jobs unceremoniously kicked out of the company he co-founded only to return years later to save Apple from its mediocrity.
The Apple pitchman’s story (he died at 56 in 2011 from cancer complications) is as familiar as his celebrated product presentations, which are fresh in the minds of millions.
Indeed, Kutcher understood that the familiarity would add to the challenge. “But I didn’t hesitate because he’s an iconic figure as much as I did because I have friends who loved him, were friends with him and cared about him,” Kutcher said.
“It isn’t always a flattering portrayal, and I wanted to make sure the way I portrayed him was the way people who loved and respected him saw him.”
By all accounts, and based on the biopic, Jobs tended to be obsessive, terse and prone to temper tantrums. He was also single-minded in his pursuit of excellence, which sometimes had him knocking heads with senior executives.
“He was actually really playful, kind of a prankster and would push people’s buttons for fun,” said Kutcher. “We tried to do a little bit of that in (Jobs). I knew that aspect of him from studying him.”
He also related to Jobs in other ways; the humble middle-class family background, dropping out of college and the fondness for art and technology.
“I went to school for one year for biochemical engineering and dropped out because I wasn’t really getting what I wanted from it,” recalled Kutcher. “And I had an opportunity to travel around the world at a young age.”
That was Kutcher’s modelling phase, which led to his Michael Kelso part on the hit sitcom That ’70s Show and subsequently a successful film career. “I think I have some kindred with his spirit in a way,” said Kutcher of Jobs. “I identify with the ethos of never being satisfied with the world.”
Jobs extreme diet regimen was another matter.
“Steve controlled a lot of his environment and was very controlling over what he ate and what he put in his body,” said Kutcher.
Some of Jobs’s dietary restraints evolved after he read Arnold Ehret’s The Mucusless Free Diet Healing System. Kutcher read it, too, but decided that he had to live it to prepare properly for the role.
“It was awful,” Kutcher said of mimicking the Apple creator’s food schedule. “I did a week where I just ate grapes, and I did a week where I just ate carrots and then I backed into a slightly more vegetarian diet and I ended up in the hospital.”
Slowly, he recovered but it took a while and lots of monitoring during the recovery process.
“My blood sugar levels got really messed up and my pancreas levels were all out of whack and I was in a lot of pain,” he remembered.
“Ultimately, I think I gained an understanding and an appreciation for his level of control in his life and his level of measured existence.”
In his Jobs deconstruction, he also concentrated on how Jobs walked, talked and gestured, and especially how he favoured the same sort of turtleneck, jeans and shoes. “It freed up his mental capacity to make choices about things he really cared about.”
One element of Jobs’s personality that Kutcher struggled to rationalize was his penchant for betraying his friends, especially Wozniak.
“It was the toughest thing to understand and justify,” admitted Kutcher. “He was a highly intelligent human being that didn’t have a relationship with people that I could understand.”
The actor’s only alternative was to recall his uncle who was also his high-school football coach as a reference to inform Jobs’s harsh behaviour.
“My uncle would call us idiots and morons and tell us to get our s--together and play harder, so I grew up with tough love,” Kutcher said.
“My family, in a lot of ways, is all about getting up, rub some dirt on it and do it better.”
To capture that essence, the actor insisted one of Jobs’s favourite retorts made into the movie.
Kutcher quoted Jobs as saying: “It’s not my job to be nice to you, it’s my job to make you better.”