Ashton Kutcher is returning to romantic comedies.
The actor hadn’t been in a rom-com since 2011 when he appeared in “New Year’s Eve” and starred opposite Natalie Portman in “No Strings Attached.” But 12 years later, Kutcher toplines the new Netflix smoocher “Your Place or Mine” with Reese Witherspoon.
“Honestly, I think I had more fun shooting this movie than I ever had,” Kutcher told me Thursday night at film’s premiere in Los Angeles. “It was genuinely a choice. I didn’t need to do it. I didn’t have to do it. It wasn’t like a career-building block. It was like, ‘I want to do this.’”
He gushed over working with Witherspoon. “I got to be in scenes across from a genuine movie star,” Kutcher said. “She’s such a movie star. It was so wonderful and fun and funny and light. There was never a dark day. There was never a day that everything went wrong. I got spoiled.”
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Witherspoon plays a Los Angeles school administrator who has to travel to New York City for work. She stays in her best friend’s (Kutcher) apartment as he heads to the West Coast to watch her young son (Wesley Kimmel) while she’s away. Written and directed by Aline Brosh McKenna, “Your Place or Mine” premieres on Netflix on Feb. 10. The cast also includes Zoë Chao, Tig Notaro, Jesse Williams, Steve Zahn, Shiri Appleby, Rachel Bloom, Griffin Matthews and Vella Lovell.
“Aline wrote the perfect script, which is a balance between a guy and a woman who have known each other for so long but literally cannot see each other,” Witherspoon said. “They can’t see that their friendship is really something more until they actually swap places and live each other’s lives for a minute. It’s beautiful, it’s classic. The final moment makes me tear up because it’s so beautiful and true, and I have a perfect partner in Ashton. He’s so funny. He’s so charming. You know he’s going to make everything better and funnier.”
Witherspoon recalled first becoming aware of Kutcher during the run of his reality series “Punk’d” in the early 2000s. Fortunately, she was never victim to any of the show’s pranks. “I am so scared to be startled,” Witherspoon said. “You don’t understand. I have a fear of being startled. Like, I don’t want a surprise party ever. I don’t like surprises. They scare me.”
She would, however, love a sequel to “Your Place or Mine.”
“It should be ‘Your Place or Mine…or Hawaii,’” she said.
