Ashton Kutcher, 44, revealed the extreme way he thought to try and save his twin brother Michael‘s life when he found out he had a life-threatening condition, in a new interview. The actor sat down with Michael as well as Dr. David Agus on Paramount+’s The Checkup, and admitted he considered jumping off a balcony to give his sibling, who has cerebral palsy, his heart when he became ill in eight grade. Doctors had diagnosed Michael with an enlarged heart and gave him four weeks to live if he didn’t get a transplant. The four weeks turned to 48 hours when he crashed and became worse.
“I was at my friend’s house, suddenly my dad picks me up and is like, ‘You’re going to go see your brother,'” Ashton tearfully said in the interview, which can be seen in the video above. “In hindsight you realize, they want me to see him because they don’t know where this is going. I go in the room and I’m like, ‘Whoa! Everything’s not OK.’ He flatlines in the room… They’re grabbing me and they take me out.”
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘If anyone’s a match, I’m a match,'” he continued. “Now you start running that cycle through your head. You’re like, ‘This balcony looks far enough to take things.'”
“Ashton went to his parents and said, ‘Take my heart.’ He said it truthfully. He really wanted to give it to his brother,” Dr. Agus then confirmed. “The person he loved most in the world, his brother, [was] going through this and he wasn’t able to… just push [Michael] along. He had helped his brother with cerebral palsy and some social issues at school, but now here’s an issue that he can’t fix.”
Michael’s life thankfully ended up being saved when an organ donor match was found within 24 hours and he received a heart transplant. His problems weren’t over then, though. He eventually developed a blood clot, two years later, and had to undergo heart surgery. The whole experience helped Ashton be grateful for his own health.
“I think standing on the balcony going, ‘I’m a match,’ that moment is probably the exact moment the shift took place,” Ashton added. “Where I’m like, ‘How do I get to be this lucky? And my brother to be born with cerebral palsy, then have a heart transplant, then have this random blood clot… Who has to go through that? How do I get to be this lucky?'”
“There was a moment in all of this where I moved to New York and was starting to get some traction with my career and Mike came out to visit and stay and he looked at me and he said, ‘Every time you feel sorry for me, you make me less. This is the only life I’ve ever known, so stop feeling sorry for the only thing I have,'” he went on. “That then created an entire shift back to where I think we are today, which is we’re straight up equals again. That’s it.”
Ashton first publicly revealed Michael had cerebral palsy in a 2003 interview, and although the latter was “angry” about it at first, he went on to see it as a “favor” that allowed him to live his true life. “[Ashton] did me the biggest favor he’s ever done because he allowed me to be myself,” Michael said in 2021.
Check out Ashton and Michael’s full interview in the video above.