Ashton Kutcher is all for the reboots, as That ’90s Show is in the works, but there’s one signature series that he has absolutely no interest in reprising.
The actor said he’d pass on revisiting his iconic MTV prank show Punk’d for a very simple and wholesome reason. “I have friends again,” Kutcher, 44, said smiling in an interview with Extra on Monday’s (July 25) red carpet for his latest film, Vengeance.
“For a long time, I would go out and like, nobody would want to hang out,” he continued. “They were like, ‘I am not messing with him.’ So now I have friends again — it’s nice to have friends.”
Kutcher co-created and hosted Punk’d in 2003 — the series would last nearly a decade, tormenting A-listers including Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Kanye West and Beyoncé. The show’s first prank was set at singer Justin Timberlake’s home, where he was led to believe that government agents were seizing his home and valuables because of unpaid income taxes. To help the pranks go along, Kutcher enlisted funnymen Dax Shepard, B.J. Novak and Bill Hader, among others.
Vengeance, B.J. Novak’s directorial debut, is set to hit theaters this Friday. The dark comic thriller follows the story of Ben Manalowitz (Novak), a journalist and podcaster who travels from New York City to West Texas to investigate the death of a girl he was hooking up with. Kutcher plays Quinten Sellers, a West Texas guru with a dark side. The rest of the cast includes Issa Rae, Boyd Holbrook, J. Smith-Cameron, and Dove Cameron.
Kutcher said of his friend’s movie, “This was the best screenplay I’ve read in a decade. It captured exactly the state of America right now, where these divergent perspectives are happening between the coasts and rural areas. It’s a movie about really trying to listen to one another, and not being so quick to judge.”
“It’s like one type of Coen Brothers movie meets another type of Coen Brothers movie, sort of Fargo meets No Country for Old Men,” he added. “Both worlds in those movies are totally realistic.”
Watch the trailer below: