Worse than he let on. Years after Ashton Kutcher opened up about his pancreatitis hospitalization while filming Jobs, Mila Kunis is setting the record straight on its severity.
“He’s downplaying it,” the Black Swan actress, 38, revealed during an episode of “Hot Ones” on Thursday, October 28. “He was dumb. He also only ate grapes at one point. It’s so stupid.”
The Ukraine native continued, “We ended up in the hospital, twice, with pancreatitis. So, fact check, yes, it was really dumb.”
Kutcher, who wed the Family Guy voice actor in July 2015, attended the YouTube taping alongside his wife.
When the 43-year-old Iowa native portrayed the Apple cofounder in the 2013 biopic, he got into character by trying Steve Jobs’ strict diet.
“First of all, the fruitarian diet can lead to like severe issues,” Kutcher told USA Today in January 2013. “I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie. I was like doubled over in pain.”
He added, “My pancreas levels were completely out of whack. It was really terrifying … considering everything.”
Years later, the Punk’d alum recalled extreme back pain that led to his hospital stay.
“Two weeks before we started shooting, all of a sudden I had this pain in my back and through the night it got worse and worse and worse and worse,” Kutcher said during an earlier “Hot Ones” episode in September 2019. “I ended up in the hospital on the maximum dose of Dilaudid because my pancreas was crazy out of whack.”
Though the Ranch alum tried to play it cool at the time, jokingly telling the First We Feast hosts, “And then I’m getting freaked out, like ‘This is the ghost of Steve Jobs taking over my pancreas,’ and I’m freaking out and it turns out it was the carrot juice causing this crazy pancreatitis.”
Jobs, which starred Kutcher and Josh Gad, premiered in April 2013, focusing on Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s Apple journey from the company launch to the debut of the iPod in 2001. The film claimed Jobs religiously followed the fruitarian diet — only eating fruits, nuts and seeds — that Kutcher tried in preparation for the role.
Following his hospital stay, the Valentine’s Day actor refused to stay down, even attending the film’s red carpet premiere that January, where he gushed about the movie.
“It’s portraying a guy who just passed away that is really fresh in people’s minds, that people are really passionate about, and care about, and have an opinion about — that’s really scary,” Kutcher told Us Weekly at the time. “Especially portraying a guy that I really admire . . . it’s terrifying, it’s terrifying!”