EXCLUSIVE: Ashton Kutcher & Wesley Kimmel Chat New Movie, Your Place or Mine
Today, February 10, Netflix released its brand new romcom, Your Place or Mine. To celebrate, we got the chance to hear from two of the stars of the movie, Ashton Kutcher and Wesley Kimmel. Check out what they had to say below.
What did you enjoy most about playing Peter?
Kutcher: “The style and the put-together essence of the character, I think it was a juxtaposition to the all-over-the-place world of Debbie. So that was fun to play. It’s just this person that had this meticulous, like, everything needed to be in its place. The pen needed to be here and the headphones here and the this there. And then, the other great thing, I’m not a very big fiction reader. I don’t read a lot of fiction. And she’s [Aline Brosh McKenna] like, ‘Yeah, but this character’s a novelist, so he’s gonna be very well-read in fiction.’ And so, I ended up diving in. Aline sent me, I think, like, 10 books prior to the film. She’s like, ‘You need to read all of these.’ And every one of the books had notecards in them about what Peter got from this book, specifically, like, what he got as a writer from this book.”
Did you end up having a favorite book?
Kutcher: “When Breath Becomes Air. That book was devastatingly wonderful. High Fidelity was very good. I read all of them. I read 10 books. I read every, single one of them. I actually fell in love with reading fiction again from this experience. So that was kind of fun and refreshing.”
You and your costar, Reese Witherspoon, have very little physical scenes together, how did you two go about creating the chemistry needed in a rom-com?
Kutcher: “Every day, we would send back and forth videos of how’s your day going? What’s going on? What’s happening with you? What are you afraid of? And then, by the time we started shooting it, we were sort of used to communicating this way. It felt really natural to communicate that way.”
Was it hard to act in the scenes where you were communicating via video call?
Kutcher: “Given the way that this was done, one side of the coverage was done before the other person even began to shoot their side of the coverage. So, we were acting against a video of the other person. You couldn’t make a choice that would dictate the choice that they had already made. You couldn’t. There was no affecting the way the other person reacts to the thing that you said.”
Wesley, your character is a lover of hockey just like you. Was that something that had already been written for the character or was it added after you were cast?
Kimmel: “Tt was always a part of the script. I had started playing hockey when I was little. I had started to learn how to skate on hockey skates. I always skate in the summers. So it was sort of like, ‘Oh, I’m skating in this.’ I had some lessons leading up towards the shoot. But, nah, it was not, like, super new.”
Kutcher: This guy’s playing this down. So we show up to shoot the hockey stuff. And he’s, like, slaying it on the ice. He’s downplaying. Like, you go out and all the sudden you look like you’ve been playing full-scale hockey your whole life. It was crazy.
Do you have any other similarities to Jack?
Kimmel: “Well, that first audition that I had we were reading the script. We were reading the
sides over just to get a gist of what was going on. And I looked up to my mom, and I was like, ‘This is
literally me.’ We had the exact same qualities, the exact same issues, the exact same allergies. And it was just like easy. It was easy to be, like, natural in the audition. It was just crazy.”
Wesley, would you say the theme of the movie is take a risk?
Kimmel; “Yeah, I think you have to take the risk. You have to accept what the outcome of that risk is. And it’s really about taking that risk.”
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo credit: Erin Simkin / Netflix