Ashton and Michael Kutcher have an unbreakable bond. The 44-year-old twins recently made headlines for their first-ever joint interview on Paramount+'s The Checkup With Dr. David Agus, and, in honor of the milestone, ET is looking back at the Kutchers' relationship.
The brothers came as quite a surprise to Kutcher parents Diane and Larry, well, at least one of them did.
"Our mother, she didn't know she was carrying twins. As they were leaving to go to the hospital, our older sister [Tausha] said, 'Bring me one home too,'" Ashton recalled. "Sure enough, she was pregnant with twins and didn't realize it because in the original scan that they took they only saw one."
Five minutes after Ashton arrived, Michael made his appearance. Immediately, differences between the two boys were evident, as Ashton weighed in at 10.5 pounds, while Michael was only four pounds.
"My parents really didn't know if I would survive through the night," Michael revealed during a 2015 interview with KCWI's Great Day, adding that he spent a month in the hospital after his birth.
While the Kutchers didn't know it at the time, "through that delivery and lack of oxygen resulted in complications, developing a mild form of cerebral palsy," Michael said on Great Day.
It was three years later, Michael revealed on The Checkup, that differences between him and Ashton really started to make themselves known.
"At the age of three, [Diane] could just tell. She was seeing [Ashton] develop at a much greater, advanced pace than myself," Michael said. "Just some slowness, some motor skill functionality was missing, slurring some of my speech. She could really just see that there were differences. I was lagging behind."
Michael was eventually diagnosed with a mild case of cerebral palsy, a disorder of movement, muscle tone, or posture, which affects his right side and vision.
"My parents had the whole philosophy that Mike's going to be able to do anything that his brother can do and they challenged me," Michael said on The Checkup. "Growing up, [Ashton] challenged me as well."
"You kind of only know what’s in front of you," Ashton explained. "Nobody in our family, nobody in our world was ever pointing out a difference. It just kind of felt like, there's things that he's good at and there's things that I'm good at."
While accepting the Robert D. Ray Pillar of Character Award at Drake University in 2017, Ashton further discussed his and Michael's connection.
"I was born a twin. From the moment I came into this world, I had to share it with someone. I shared every birthday, every Christmas. I shared my bedroom. I shared my clothes. I shared everything I had in this world," Ashton said. "I didn't know that there was another way, because I always had my brother with me."
While Michael's differences went largely unnoticed in the Kutcher household, the same can't be said for how kids at school handled his "obvious differences," which included "eye sight, the hearing loss, speech impediment."
"When we went to middle school, suddenly there were kids from other schools that hadn't grown up with us that had a different perspective," Ashton said on The Checkup. "That's when there was an awareness of what was going on."
When that awareness developed, Ashton became Michael's "protector," the latter twin said on the Paramount+ series.
"In a lot of times where we were playing soccer, where maybe other kids would exclude me if I didn't have a twin, he would always make sure that I was included," Michael added of Ashton.
In a 2021 interview with the Today show, Michael said that Ashton went so far as to only accept a sleepover invitation if his twin was invited too.
"Most of the time they'd say yes, but sometimes they'd say no and Chris would go, 'Well, then I'm not coming,'" Michael said of Ashton, whose family still calls him Chris. "Chris would tell me, 'I wish I could take all of this off of you -- and take it myself.'"
Michael also spoke about his experience with bullies, recalling how one time a group interrupted the brothers' bike ride by yelling the r-word.
"My brother picked a fight with them. He stood up for me," Michael said. "He wanted them to treat me with respect. And that meant a lot."
During Ashton's award acceptance speech about character, he said that the trait came out for him when "you're walking your brother home from school and some kid hits you in the back of the head because he wants to fight with your brother and you say, 'No, you're not going to fight with my brother.' And you tell your brother to keep walking."
While Dr. Agus said the brothers were "inseparable" as kids, that doesn't mean they didn't have the typical sibling scuffles.
"We shared clothes. We would beat each other up and wrestle. We'd jump off of the porch railing and pile drive each other. We fought like crazy. I almost broke your neck that one time," Ashton said on the show.
Diane confirmed as much during a 2005 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, noting that her boys "were the most mischievous guys growing up."
"We definitely duked it out quite a bit," Michael agreed on The Checkup. "We did what normal siblings do."
Sibling rivalry was pushed to the backburner in eighth grade, when Michael developed flu-like symptoms. When he didn't improve after a week, Diane took Michael to the emergency room, where they soon discovered that he had an enlarged heart and needed a transplant. He was given three to four weeks to live.
Doctors were initially hopeful that they could treat the situation with drugs, but that proved insufficient. Shortly thereafter, Michael crashed and was given just two days to live, with a transplant being his only hope.
"Throughout Michael's stay in the hospital," Diane said on The Oprah Winfrey Show, "Ashton was always with him."
During one such visit, Michael flatlined. Ashton cried while discussing the scary moment on The Checkup. After learning about the severity of his brother's condition, Ashton went into problem-solving mode.
"I'm thinking to myself, 'If anyone's a match, I'm a match,'" Ashton said. "Now you start running that cycle through your head. You're like, 'This balcony looks far enough to take things.'"
In an interview with ET's Kevin Frazier, Dr. Agus said that, for Ashton, that moment "was the realization that this could be the end" for Michael.
"Ashton went to his parents and said, 'Take my heart.' He said it truthfully. He really wanted to give it to his brother," Dr. Agus told ET. "...The person he loved most in the world, his brother, [was] going through this and he wasn't able to... just push [Michael] along. He had helped his brother with cerebral palsy and some social issues at school, but now here's an issue that he can't fix."
As for how Michael handled the situation, he emotionally recalled on The Checkup, "You just realize that the fighting that we do as siblings, the arguing with the parents, and 13-year-old behavior, it just isn't what it’s about... You don't see a lot of 13-year-olds tell their siblings they love them, but to me it was the most important thing I could do, that I could say to them. It just brings the value of life a little bit closer."
Against all odds, Michael found a match in 24 hours and received a heart transplant, something Dr. Agus told ET was as likely as "winning the lottery."
Just two years later, though, Michael developed a blood clot and had to have open heart surgery. While the brothers had always viewed themselves as equals, all of Michael's health woes changed things, at least for a while.
"I'm like, 'How do I get to be this lucky? And my brother [has] to be born with cerebral palsy, then have a heart transplant, then have this random blood clot,'" Ashton recalled questioning on The Checkup. "... You're just like, 'Who has to go through that? How do I get to be this lucky?'"
Ashton attempted to address that perceived inequality a few years later. Though Michael revealed on a 2019 appearance on the Koncrete podcast that Ashton "always wanted to act," the latter twin put those dreams aside when it came time to go to college, instead deciding to work and put himself through school to study genetics.
"[He] wanted to find cures and develop different research around my heart ailment. That was his career path at first," Michael said on his podcast, with Diane adding on The Oprah Winfrey Show, "He wanted to help others and try to find a reason why this virus struck his brother's heart."
During Ashton's sophomore year of college, though, he got invited to a modeling competition.
"He kind of tussled with that invite for a while. He did the talent show, actually won the talent show," Michael recalled on the podcast. "He went on to go to New York to be in a larger modeling talent show and ended up placing well in that talent show."
Shortly thereafter, Michael said, "my brother's on billboards, modeling underwear for Calvin Klein." While Michael has always been proud of his brother, jealousy did seep in.
"It was difficult being a twin. Mom and Dad kind of mold you together as one. It was always 'Chris and Mike. Chris and Mike.' It's like, 'Well, why does he always have to be first? Why can't it be Mike and Chris?' We did start to see individual lives and paths start," Michael said on the podcast, adding that he "really struggled" with his identity during that period.
"Now I'm not just 'Chris and Mike,' now I'm 'Ashton's brother,'" he said. "... Why does it matter who I'm related to? I struggled with that, just finding my own identity. Who is Michael Kutcher? It was a difficult time for me, my 20s."
Michael expanded on those feelings on The Checkup, admitting that "jealousy" led to friction in his relationship with his twin.
"There was a moment when I viewed him as receiving more attention than I was and that kind of drove me down to a place where I was jealous," he said. "Here we are one and two for so many years and then he goes up the mountain to do immense things and become a household name and it really affected me in terms of my own self-worth."
Though Ashton was experiencing success, he also had guilt. Michael was quick to banish those thoughts from Ashton's mind.
"I spent years and years feeling bad about it, our inequalities," Ashton said during his award acceptance speech. "[Michael] also taught me that he has gifts that I didn't have, extraordinary gifts that I didn't have. And that every time I felt sorry for him in life, I made him less. He taught me that and he gave that to me."
Ashton further reflected on that conversation with Michael on The Checkup.
"I moved to New York and was starting to get some traction with my career and Mike came out to visit and stay and he looked at me and he said, 'Every time you feel sorry for me, you make me less. This is the only life I've ever known, so stop feeling sorry for the only thing I have,'" Ashton recalled, before admitting that he was "an a**hole for a while," because "it's so easy to believe the good things people are saying about you."
Eventually, the brothers talked things out.
"We both kind of came head-to-head with our differences and it was through a conversation where we were like, 'Why aren't we as close as we used to be?'" Ashton said. "It's easy when you sort of pent up this jealousy or anger or frustration or pity or all of these variable things they all become walls between people... I think we both had this moment of reckoning and realization where we decided to tear down the walls that we had built that were all a product of these variable circumstances."
"It goes back to trying to figure out who I am. Once we kind of got together, we talked through that and I realized he's still my brother," Michael added. "The world may view him differently, but I know him. He's still my brother and he hasn't changed and he never will change. Once I took all of the fame and everything out of it, I was able to come back to him."
A bump in the road for the brothers came in 2003, when Ashton, unaware that Michael wasn't publicly sharing his cerebral palsy diagnosis, discussed his twin's health in an interview.
"I was very angry. Very angry," Michael told Today in 2021. "I remember speaking to him about it. I didn’t want to be the face of CP. I never talked about it."
Eventually, though, Ashton unknowingly outing him allowed Michael to "fall into my purpose" of CP and organ donation awareness, he said on the Koncrete podcast.
"[Ashton] did me the biggest favor he's ever done because he allowed me to be myself. I was finally ready to tell my story and I knew because of my twin, I'd have a big reach," Michael told the Today show, before adding on Great Day, "I realized through his celebrity-ism that I really could use that to have a voice, and to not really just be Ashton's brother, but to be Michael and show my story and tell my story."
Michael, who currently resides in Colorado with his wife and three children, further opened up about his purpose today on The Checkup.
"I came to the understanding of, 'What are you hiding? Why are you hiding behind this instead of being truly who you are?'" Michael said. "... I really struggled for a lot of my early adulthood trying to figure out who Michael was. Once he gave me the opportunity to really express this part of me, I thought, 'Well, if we’re out there, I might as well do good with it. I might as well be an advocate.'"
As for their brotherly relationship, while on the Koncrete podcast, Michael referred to Ashton as "one of my best friends."
"He's a great inspiration to me, a role model to me," Michael said. "How do I utilize [his] notoriety for the greater good and be able to give back to people? Those are some great lessons that my brother taught me, the gift of generosity and giving back to others."
Through Michael's outlook on life, Ashton said during his 2017 acceptance speech that his brother has taught him that "we all have the equal capacity to love one another."
"My brother's daily actions remind me that life isn't about running around challenges -- it's about running through them," Ashton told the Today show in 2021. "Mike has a relentless work ethic and a deep compassion for others."
On The Checkup, Ashton added, "My brother's situation, I think, gave me an appreciation for life that, in some ways, is an unfair advantage."
"Going at life where you go, 'Oh wow. This is my brother. He’s my twin. We’re the same.' And you go, 'You can die when you're 12, 13.' When you have this face-to-face with death at that age, you instantly lock into, 'Let me do as much as I can while I can 'cause I don't know when it’s going to be over. Given the fact that you have this opportunity to be alive today, what are you doing with today?'"
The Checkup With Dr. David Agus will debut the series' first three episodes on Paramount+ Tuesday, Dec. 6, with the final three episodes debuting on Monday, Dec. 12.
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