Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher on why they won't team up on-screen beyond their new Super Bowl ad
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are having a mini on-screen reunion — in a Cheetos commercial that will air during Sunday’s Super Bowl.
The pair spoke to Yahoo Entertainment about the spot — which also features Shaggy as Kunis adopts his “It Wasn’t Me” as a defense after being caught orange-handed with her husband’s snacks — as well as why fans won’t soon see the parents of two co-starring in a bigger project. They also spoke about whether their kids — daughter Wyatt, 6, and son Dimitri, 4 — know they are famous.
Kutcher, who co-starred with Kunis on That ‘70s Show, long before they coupled up, said they “reluctantly” read the pitch for the commercial, thinking they were “never going to do it, but let’s read it. We’re in a pandemic, we don’t have anything else to do — other than chase our kids, and teach them, and feed them, and work.” However, “it made us laugh,” adds Kunis, whose fingers and face are dusted with “Cheetle” (the actual name of Cheetos dust) throughout the ad.
“We were both like: Should we do it?” Kutcher recalls. “Frankly, Mila says it the best: ‘We get to leave the house for two days? We don’t have to chase our kids around?’ That seemed like fun,” amid the grind of pandemic parenting. “And everybody kind of needs to laugh right now.”
Working together was definitely the selling point.
“It’s not horrible working with the person you like most in the world,” Kutcher says of his wife, whom he married in 2015, three years after they started dating.
Kunis adds, “For me, my favorite thing to do is laugh,” says Kunis. “My husband makes me laugh all day long. He makes me laugh more than anybody. I don’t know if that’s necessarily good to do while shooting a commercial but...”
But they won’t be working together on-screen in bigger projects anytime soon as it’s hard for them both to be putting in long days on the set and not feel like absentee parents.
“That’s the whole thing,” Kutcher says. “We just want to be good parents. If something presented itself that was: ‘OK, you have an 8-hour shoot day and you’re in Los Angeles and the kids can go to school...”
Kunis picks up, “...and it’s only Monday though Friday, no weekends. [But] this stuff doesn’t exist. The truth is: I’m lucky because my husband has like 1000 jobs, right?” referring to his off-camera projects. “So when I go and shoot a movie, he still works 9 to 5 — or more like 9 to 5 plus midnight to 4 a.m. — but he’s there for the kids. On a film shoot, it’s a 15- or 16- hour days, so you don’t see the kids unless you bring them to set.”
She continues, “So I’m super fortunate in that way” to have him step in when she’s away working, including on her new film Breaking News in Yuba County, out Feb. 21. “And then vice versa. When he shoots, I stay home. Or I don’t go and shoot but and produce. There’s no way of us doing [a show or movie] together and feel like we’re good parents. I think we would have so much guilt we’d forget to enjoy our jobs. At least this way, only one of us is guilty.”
If you’d ask their kids what Kunis and Kutcher do for a living, the answer is “play pretend for work.” They don’t know they’re famous per se.
“I don’t think they understand what that is,” Kutcher says.
Kunis breaks in, “Two days ago my parents were over [and] I mentioned I had to wake up [early today] to do press for the commercial. Wyatt said: ‘Oh, the thing that you and daddy shot during quarantine?’ My dad turns to me, in Russian, and asked: ‘Do they know what you do for a living now?’”
She continues, “I think she thinks it’s a job. It is a job. But I don’t think she thinks of it any different than a doctor, a grocery store employee, the Instacart driver, mommy’s an actress, that guy’s a security guard. She doesn’t think it’s any different than anybody else’s job.”
Kutcher then relays a story from the day before, while talking about their menu on Super Bowl Sunday, when Wyatt said they couldn’t be away from the TV at half-time or they would miss Mom and Dad’s commercial.
Kunis says, “But in the coolest of ways, I think it’s...”
“...just a job” to them,” Kutcher jumps in. “Which is what it is to us.”
Kunis continues, “100 percent. So I think that maybe this is the first time she was like, ‘Mom and Dad play pretend for a living.’ That’s it. That’s their concept of what we do.”
This is the first year they’ll be home on Super Bowl Sunday, which is also Kutcher’s 43rd birthday. (Of the birthday, Kunis, 37, quips, “I mean it’s quarantine and COVID, so nothing exciting is happening. We may have streamers and a banner, OK?”) They really don’t have any grand expectations of how it will play out, especially with kids with kid attention spans.
“What’s going to ultimately happen is that I’m going to watch the Super Bowl and my wife is going to be the greatest wife in the world and when the kids are over watching it, she’s going to be like: ‘OK, guys, let’s go do this...’ Then at halftime I’ll...”
“Tag in,” she continues. “They’ll pop in. I don’t think they’ll sit there for two hours-plus. There’s no way. They’ll be in and out. Our son loves Hot Wheels and dinosaurs, so he’ll bring those into the room and make lots of noise with them.”
Kutcher adds, “Every year, we’ve gotten another five or so more minutes out of it.”
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