Ashton Kutcher’s Twin Brother Is Michael Kutcher

Michael Kutcher, Ashton Kutcher’s twin brother, was born with cerebral palsy, a condition in which the motor-control centers of the brain are damaged.The twins grew up in the cornfields of Iowa and Ashton was Michael’s self-appointed protector. “That was a big part of my life,” Ashton recalls, “kind of looking out for my twin.”The experience helped give the actor an “understanding of what it’s like to be the other guy,” his pal and business partner, Jason Goldberg, says. “‘Why my brother and not me?’” He says Kutcher emanates a particular kind of warmth—that he’s like the popular kid in school who was nice to all the losers: “That’s a big strength of his.”

“I was the kid with the big Coke-bottle glasses, the hearing aid,” says Michael Kutcher, who still lives in Iowa, where he sells retirement plans. “There was a lot of teasing, a lot of the normal mean stuff.”For Ashton, a biochemical-engineering major who dropped out of the University of Iowa at age 19, school “came really easy,” and he seems to find the entertainment business as easy as he found his best subject, math.At the peak of his career, and just after being named the world’s most eligible bachelor, Ashton decided to tie the knot with Demi Moore, 15 years his senior.

Ashton says he quickly got over any issues he had with her close relationship with her ex, Bruce Willis.“You walk into a relationship and there’s always jealousies, like, ‘Oh, the other guy’… and, in this case, the other guy is Bruce Willis!“But my wife’s a smart individual, one of the smartest people I know,” he says. “If she likes and respects this person, then I think I can get over my jealousy.”Michael Kutcher says that Ashton quickly realized that “for the love of the girls, Demi included, he just had to get over that whole jealousy thing. All of them together, with Bruce, do an amazing job at raising that family.”