Ashton Kutcher, The Beauty, Hulu Release, and Demi Moore 

Ashton Kutcher returns in The Beauty, praising ex-wife Demi Moore’s performance in The Substance.

Ashton Kutcher returns

Can an obsession with looking perfect actually be a death sentence? This is the central, chilling question of Hulu’s upcoming series The Beauty, and for lead actor Ashton Kutcher, the project arrives at a moment of strange personal and professional symmetry.

As Kutcher prepares to play a shadowy billionaire peddling a “miracle drug” for eternal youth, he finds himself fielding questions about his former wife, Demi Moore, whose own recent masterpiece, The Substance, explored the exact same gruesome territory.

The Professional Pivot 

For years, Ashton Kutcher was the face of the “lover boy” or the “goofy entrepreneur.”

In The Beauty, based on the acclaimed graphic novel, he sheds that skin to play a man who has engineered physical perfection as a marketable condition.

This isn’t just another tech-thriller; it is a dystopian critique of our current “Ozempic era,” where the pursuit of the ideal body carries a hidden, trillion-dollar cost. 

Kutcher’s character represents the ultimate apex of corporate greed—a man who will protect his empire even as the “miracle” he sold begins to rot society from within.

The Demi Moore “Substance” 

The timing is impossible to ignore. Demi Moore’s performance in The Substance earned her the best reviews of her career, and Kutcher is the first to applaud.

“I’m so proud of her, she killed it,” he noted recently, addressing the thematic similarities between their projects.

Despite a high-profile split in 2011 and Moore’s 2019 memoir Inside Out—which detailed Kutcher’s alleged infidelity—the two have reached a state of professional “no badness.” 

Kutcher has made a conscious effort to stay in the lives of Moore’s daughters with Bruce Willis, acknowledging the eight years he spent helping raise them through their adolescence.

A Meta-Cast for a Meta-Show 

Perhaps the most intriguing element of The Beauty is its cast. Alongside Kutcher, the show features supermodel Bella Hadid—a woman whose face is often cited as the “scientific” gold standard of beauty—and the mercurial Evan Peters. 

By casting Hadid in a story about the dangers of physical perfection, the show creates a hall-of-mirrors effect that challenges the audience to look past the surface.

Reality of Celebrity Reinvention 

Society often expects ex-spouses to be in a state of perpetual conflict, especially when their career themes overlap.

However, the Kutcher-Moore dynamic suggests a counter-intuitive truth: The most successful “second acts” in Hollywood often happen when actors stop running from their past and start using their lived experiences—marriage, age gaps, and public scrutiny—as fuel for darker, more complex roles. 

Kutcher isn’t trying to be the “cool guy” anymore; he’s leaning into the “shadowy” complexities of a man who understands how the world works.

The “Miracle Drug” Narrative 

As The Beauty premieres on January 21, it joins a growing list of media questioning the ethics of bio-hacking and cosmetic surgery.

The show’s premise—that beauty is a condition you can “catch”—is a visceral metaphor for the viral nature of modern social media standards.

Key Takeaways:

• A Darker Kutcher: The Beauty marks a significant departure from his previous comedic and romantic roles.
• The Family Bond: Despite the divorce, Kutcher remains a supportive figure for Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah Willis.
• Thematic Synchronicity: Both Kutcher and Moore are currently starring in projects that deconstruct the “eternal beauty” myth.