Ashton Kutcher reveals why he was 'fired' from Elizabethtown in Hot Ones interview

The star was originally slated to play Orlando Bloom's role
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Megan C. Hills27 September 2019

Elizabethtown sees characters played by Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst fall in love in a Cameron Crowe directed romantic comedy.

But the film, which opened to lukewarm reviews, was originally supposed to star Ashton Kutcher before the star was “fired” from the role.

Kutcher was a guest on YouTube channel First We Feast’s interview series Hot Ones, where stars eat hot wings of increasing intensity while being asked difficult questions.

At one point, Kutcher is asked about his rumoured firing from the film and hesitates before confirming it.

He says, “Fired... yeah, I’ll say fired.”

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Kutcher revealed that Bloom was actually Crowe’s first choice for the project, but the actor was tied up with a Ridley Scott film (Kingdom of Heaven) and wasn’t available for the part.

He continued, “So, I went in, I auditioned, he cast me and then we started working on it. I, uh, think he wanted to see the character in rehearsals like all the way.”

The character Kutcher was supposed to play was a man named Drew Baylor, who is forced to return home to Kentucky after the death of his father and meets a charming air hostess (played by Dunst) on the journey.

“I probably wasn’t disciplined enough as an actor to get myself to a point where I was able to do that, show it to [Crowe] in a way that he felt comfortable,” he said. “At a certain point, we just agreed it wasn’t working out - more him than me.”

After Kutcher was fired, Bloom ended up landing the role. Kutcher added, “I found out, at the same time, that Orlando Bloom had just become available right when he decided to let me go. So I think he had a nice safety net that he could land on.”

Orlando Bloom and Cameron Crowe
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Kutcher might have dodged a bullet, as Elizabethtown failed to impress critics and currently holds a 29% RottenTomatoes score, as well as a more generous 6.4 on IMDB.

Dunst’s character Claire Colburn did help spark the creation of a new phrase, the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, after The AV Club’s Nathan Rabin used it to refer to Dunst in one of his reviews.

Rabin said that it was a female character who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”, though he later disowned the term after he said it was a “fundamentally sexist one”.

Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher in 2017
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In the same interview, Kutcher opened up about being hospitalised for pancreatitis after following one of Steve Jobs' known and very eccentric habits - drinking carrot juice (Kutcher played Steve Jobs in the 2013 film Jobs.)

He also revealed that he had finally thrown out “a bunch of the trucker hats” from his Noughties show Punk’d and still has his character Kelso's “entire wardrobe from That 70s show”, the television series on which he met his wife Mila Kunis.

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