Steve Jobs wasn't the nicest guy in the world, but certainly was one of the most brilliant.
"We wanted to tell an honest tale," said Ashton Kutcher, who plays the late, legendary Apple leader in the superb movie "Jobs," coming out Friday. "In telling an honest tale, you had to honor his faults and his gifts."
Kutcher worked hard perfecting his spot-on portrayal of the driven, visionary Jobs — light-years from the lovable dopes he’s played on “That ’70s Show” or “Dude, Where’s My Car.”
“I had the good fortune of having three months to prepare for the role, which is a liberty I hadn’t been afforded before,” Kutcher said. “I started by consuming every book or blog or anything I could find that was written about him, watching videos about him. The last 20 years of his life were really well-documented. I started consuming the content he consumed, artists he admired.”
The actor known nearly as much for his digital savvy as for his high-profile romances found he had some things in common with Jobs, and related to him well.
“I use Apple products quite a bit,” said Kutcher, who in 2009 became the first individual to rack up 1 million Twitter followers; he’s now over 14.6 million. “I have a desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, all that stuff. I appreciate how hard it was to make things simple. I think we take for granted the simplicity of these objects. The simple details, like when you close your phone, it makes a clicking sound. When you open it, it makes a swishing sound. They’re really little, brilliant things that took massive quantities of time and effort and thought.”
Given the techno-heavy theme of the movie and interview, we decided to engage our online audience to help out. Kelly Blake of Lilburn, chiming in via Facebook, came up with a question we never would have thought of: "Please ask him if he has ever toured the Amana Iowa history museum and how he thinks Iowa has changed since he grew up there," she suggested.
Kutcher said he has not had a chance to visit the Amana Heritage Society & Museums, which "offer a rich historical experience of the German communal settlement in the Iowa Valley" (find out more at www.amanaheritage.org). But he struck a wistful note in discussing his home state.
“One of the beautiful things about it is it hasn’t changed a lot,” the Cedar Rapids native said. “You can take things at face value there. People kind of tell you what they think and how they feel. People there are kind and generous. They’re honest. I hope that never changes.”
To those of you hoping for scoop on his well-documented split from Demi Moore or his current lady friend Mila Kunis, sorry.
“One of the things I’ve learned from social media is the value of privacy,” he said. “My own life isn’t for public consumption.”
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