A career buff-up

WALKING up the dusty Hollywood canyon in 100-degree heat, inhaling great gulps of smog, I begin to wonder if I’m being punk’d. It’s not that I’m famous or anything, it’s just that my hiking partner is Ashton Kutcher, who created the MTV show where people are subjected to elaborate, ego-puncturing practical jokes -- they’re punk’d. He’s also well known for starring as the dumb brunet on “That ‘70s Show,” headlining such cinematic milestones as “Dude, Where’s My Car?,” and marrying Demi Moore, who happens to be 15 years his senior, a May-December romance that has kept the tabloids titillated for years.

Kutcher assures me that this jaunt into heat exhaustion is not some elaborate goof. “I’m not that deviant,” he says. “I always find it funny that people think they’re getting punk’d when I’m around. That’s the worst way to punk somebody, right?” He also insists that turning a reporter into a hyperventilating, dizzy, red-faced mass is not an extreme case of passive-aggressiveness either.

Venturing up the hill in the midday sun, he offers some advice. “Hydrate! Hydrate!” It’s delivered in his best drill sergeant voice. The 28-year-old former Iowa boy is freakily good-looking in a slightly antiseptic, eternally boyish, Calvin Klein kind of way, with a long, lean figure, sculpted cheekbones and brown eyes bigger than your average doe’s.

He arrived on a motorcycle, casually dropped his jeans to reveal gray shorts, strapped on a backpack and bandanna, then began to clip-clop blithely up the hill like a horse out for a casual saunter. He appears to be in good shape -- in part because he’s just back from his summer house in Idaho, the hills of the oxygen-deprived, and, oh, yes, he recently spent eight months doing six-hour-a-day workouts to get physically ready for his latest role, as a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in the upcoming adventure flick “The Guardian.”

Ashton Kutcher, action hero?

It’s kind of a change of pace for a guy whose resume includes the airy comedies “Cheaper by the Dozen,” “Guess Who” and “Just Married,” and who’s better known for the list of starlets he’s dated than his cred as a macho man and thrasher of enemies.

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According to a master plan

ALAS, there seems to be a time in every young actor’s career when he must try on the mantle of Tom Cruise -- not the psychiatry-bashing, couch-jumping megastar of late but the Tom Cruise of the “Top Gun” era, the testosterone-pumped, arrogant hot-shot, who needs to have an attitude adjustment before he becomes the soldier-leader he’s destined to become. “Top Gun” was the shiny, throbbing Jerry Bruckheimer version of the myth. An earlier incarnation was “An Officer and a Gentleman,” with a tight-lipped Richard Gere, a young Debra Winger and an overlay of class consciousness that gave the film a kick of importance. Kutcher’s latest movie, “The Guardian,” plays as a mishmash of the two earlier films, with a dollop of “Good Will Hunting” and that film’s feel-good pop psychology.

Given the country’s ambivalence about the wars at hand, it’s not surprising that Kutcher’s version features a hero who’s not fighting anyone but the ocean, who must make it through the hardest basic training there is and survive the maniacal tasks assigned by his instructor, the beaten-down former rescue swimmer extraordinaire Kevin Costner in the Louis Gossett Jr.-Robin Williams part.

If this strategy works out right, Kutcher will follow in a long line of male actors who turned into major international movie stars with the right action flick. Will Smith was just the amiable “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” before he became a fighter pilot in “Independence Day.” Nicolas Cage was just a talented weirdo before Bruckheimer buffed and revamped him into a power he-man with such flicks as “The Rock” and “Con Air.” Unlike comedy, or drama, action is the one genre that works all across the globe, from India to the Ukraine to Latin America -- and an ability to carry high-octane movies can justify a $20-million-plus paycheck.

Of course, the master plan to turn actors into heroes doesn’t always pan out. Johnny Depp floundered in subpar actioners like “Nick of Time” before hitting his stride years later as a jaunty, subversive pirate in “Pirates of the Caribbean.” And Demi Moore, Mrs. Ashton Kutcher, proudly shaved her head and polished her body to star in “G.I. Jane,” which flopped ignobly.

In person, Kutcher seems awfully amiable to play a smart-ass. When I tentatively point out that “The Guardian” seems, err, reminiscent of “Top Gun” and “An Officer and a Gentleman,” he merely grins.

“That’s a compliment. Thank you for that.” He cheerfully admits that he didn’t start out buffed. The first day, the trainer asked him to do as many pull-ups as he could in a minute. Then he was supposed to rest for a minute, then do more ....

“I jump up on the bar. One pull-up. That was it.... He’s going, ‘C’mon, man, keep going.’ I’m trying. Nothing’s happening. He’s like, ‘ooooooh.’ I started being able to do one pull-up, run a mile, and swim 25 meters. By the end, I feel I could have gotten through the program.” In the film, at least half of rescue-swimmer cadets fail, unable to bear tasks like treading water in an icy tank. At least cinematically, A-school kills.

“Yeah, I’d make it through,” says Kutcher with a little braggadocio as he books up the hill. “I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t have any desire to.” This said, he elaborates. “I believe that there are people who are bound and determined to be successful no matter what they’re doing. I feel like no matter what [football great] Peyton Manning did, he would find success. He’s just the kind of guy who buckles down at all costs. The idea of failing is just not an option.” As he strides, he’s clearly talking about himself.

“I’ll find success no matter what. I believe it. It’s truly contingent upon your will. I’m by no means the best actor. I’m by no means even the best actor in my age group.” Hmm, Heath Ledger and Leonardo DiCaprio come to mind. “But people know that I’m going to work hard for them. I think consistency pays. You can’t will yourself to be successful in the business, but at the same time, I’m kind of living proof that you can.” This vaguely Tom Cruise-ian personal empowerment rant would be a lot more believable coming from a more prosaic source rather than a charter member of the tribe of the genetically blessed. In the old days, he used to self-deprecatingly refer to his face as “the money-maker” and willingly skewer his own celebrity.

“He is earnest,” says Shawn Levy, who directed Kutcher in “Just Married” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” “That’s definitely the trait that surprises people. Ashton has always taken what he does and how he does it seriously, even on ‘Just Married’ when he was a sitcom star with just one movie under his belt. The work ethic has been there from the get-go really strong, but there is a youthful goofiness that has given way to a more grown-up vibe.”

Others in Hollywood who’ve just discovered Kutcher seem to marvel at the Ashton phenomenon, i.e. his seeming ability to connect with the prized teen-plus demographic. “I didn’t realize the weight he has in youth culture,” says “The Guardian” director Andrew Davis. “He connects with people. I think that is going to translate into huge stardom.” That’s certainly optimism talking.

At least Kutcher is a chivalrous hiking partner. He carries the tape recorder. He offers to carry my bag. By the time we hit the top of the mountain, I’m seriously lightheaded. I look around for a bit of shade but can only find some dusty shrubs.

He tells me not to sit down. Bad for the body. I look at him, apologize, and crawl under a bush.

He peers down at me for a second, then plops down. “I’ll sit too, then you won’t feel like you’re the only one sitting. Then you’ll feel better.” Who could hate a movie star who’d crawl under a bush with you? Unlike some, Ashton Kutcher’s not going to leave a reporter strewn alongside the trail like celebrity roadkill.

It’s only in the intimacy of the bush that I get up the courage to ask about the elephant in the room: whether his relationship with Moore has somehow damaged his stock as an actor. The pair met at a dinner party when Kutcher was hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 2003, and ever since the tabloids have had a field day painting Kutcher as a boy toy, snapping endless shots of Moore, Kutcher, her three girls and her ex-husband, Bruce Willis. He doesn’t like this question. A scrim falls over his features, each beautiful plane seems encased in plastic.

“Nah, my career is exactly where it’s supposed to be. And my career isn’t bad.”

After they got married in a cabala wedding, “it’s calmed down and everyone backed off. We’re not adopting kids. We get to stay more mellow. The tabloids like blood and guts, like people breaking up, getting married, having babies and dying.”

Born to a pair of factory workers who divorced when he was 13, Kutcher grew up in Iowa yearning to be an actor, though it didn’t seem a particularly realistic goal. “There’s not really a whole lot of acting things in Iowa. I felt that I needed a responsible career.” He studied biochemical engineering for two years at college but dropped out after he won a modeling contest. Soon after, he was traveling the world modeling for the likes of Klein, Versace and Abercrombie & Fitch.

In his first pilot season out, he landed the role of sweet dimwit Kelso on the career-making sitcom “That ‘70s Show.”

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And then there’s the producing

NOT long after, he launched his career as an impresario, with his own production company, Katalyst Films. The company not only produced “Punk’d” but also the recent reality hit “Beauty and the Geek,” which teams beautiful women with geeky but smart men. It’s clear with whom Kutcher identifies.

“I just think everybody feels like a geek, no matter who you are. You’re an outsider. The asymmetry of the girls who got it their way and the guys who didn’t,” he says. Kutcher reels off other projects and says he’s at the office 9 to 5 when he’s not doing the movie star thing. He even still pitches ideas for “Punk’d.” “Mine are usually the ones you can’t pull off. Mine are on some other weird stratosphere, like trying to burn someone’s house down,” he says.

It’s a lot for a second career, and at least once a month he suffers from a bout of insomnia, like the night before the hike. Kutcher is only in L.A. briefly, having spent the previous week jetting around the country visiting Coast Guard facilities. The next day, he leaves for the D.C. premiere of his movie, the Toronto Film Festival and the New York fashion shows, where he plans to research a piece he’s writing for Harper’s Bazaar about why men don’t care about women’s fashion.

“I could not sleep. I was lying in bed. You know, when you’re lying in bed and you start to think of all the things you should be doing and it just spirals? And then you catch yourself. Why am I just thinking about me? You should be thinking about somebody else. You think about all the things you could do for that person and that spirals. It’s crazy.”

He finally realized what was bothering him. “I’m leaving tomorrow for D.C., and I don’t like being in the same city as George Bush.” Kutcher once infamously told Rolling Stone about meeting the Bush twins at an event and bringing them back to his pad for an after-party where they were “underage drinking” and a friend of his was “smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah.” He doesn’t seem to be worried, however, about a replay, or an irate dad on his tail. His concerns are now political. Kutcher is no longer the perpetual party boy. He drives a motorcycle not just because it’s cool but also because he “can’t justify burning gas when people are being killed for it.”

Being in the same city as America’s commander in chief apparently gives him a major case of anxiety. “How many people did Osama kill in 9/11? A lot of people, but not nearly as many people as we killed in Iraq. Then I started thinking there’s a lot more money in the oil business than there is in the entertainment business. How much is on George Bush’s head?” he says. “It’s like going out for a beer with Osama bin Laden. It’s not a great place to be. I don’t want to hang out in the same town as the president.” This rant pops out of nowhere. For a moment he sounds a lot angrier and urgent than what seems to be his baseline persona of casually laid-back.

Part of the reason Kutcher wanted to make “The Guardian,” he explains, is “I just felt that America needs heroes. I just found heroes in these guys who dedicated their lives to save other people’s lives. They don’t have to kill anyone to do it. I thought it was a noble career.”

We’re finally heading down the mountain. I ask Kutcher who his heroes are. He lists football great Walter Payton, as well as Steve McQueen, whose films he watched repeatedly as he prepared for “The Guardian.” “He was one of the first action-y guys, but he still had that strut. He was pretty quiet most of the time but held his space.” He begins reminiscing about how kids today -- i.e. his twentysomething peers -- don’t have much sense of film history, don’t know who Cary Grant is, don’t have much appreciation for the works of Dennis Hopper or even Warren Beatty.

Kutcher recently came up with an idea for a movie about a male florist who knows all the love secrets of his clients. It’s kind of like Beatty’s “Shampoo” but with flowers. Kutcher and screenwriter Kevin Bisch (“Hitch”) sold the pitch to Columbia for $2 million, and the actor plans to star.

“I had breakfast with him one day,” says Kutcher of Beatty. “It was like hanging out with the older brother you always wished you had. He’s one of the smoothest guys on the planet. This is the man.” With his facility for light comedy, his cheerfully innocent manner and his on-screen sex appeal, it’s a lot easier imagining Kutcher growing up one day to play the Warren Beatty parts rather than slinking fiercely and angrily about as McQueen did.

Even he seems to intuit this.

At the end of the hike, he quickly reassembles his street garb, dons huge sunglasses and a helmet, and climbs back onto his motorcycle, a shiny black monster that a studio gave him as a gift -- after it used his mug without permission in an ad.

He’s looking like Beatty in “Shampoo.” “Yeah, all I need is a hair dryer in my back pocket,” he laughs.

“Be good!” he screams, and zooms off into his day.

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com