Okay, Smart Guy

"You'd walk down the street and feel people looking at you like, 'Oh, that's the kid that broke into the high school,' " he says. "Then my girlfriend broke up with me. Then I lost my college scholarships and got kicked out of the National Honor Society and the choir and the play. That was sort of my relationship with my town.

"If you're that kid, now you're marked. That's who you are. I wasn't stealing money from the school, I was stealing from them. They pay the tax dollars and that money is what provides things for the school, so I wasn't breaking into the school, I was breaking into their home; I was turning my back on everyone. Which is -- you know, you're not thinking that when it's 1 in the morning and you and your cousin are [fooling] around after a kegger, going 'What can we do? What would be fun?' "

Looking back, Kutcher calls the experience "the best thing that could ever have happened to me.

"Getting in trouble, learning a life lesson -- it straightened me out pretty quick," he says.

At the time, though, he was miserable. He was banned from the prom and other activities, McDonald says, but allowed to graduate -- and did so in the top five of his class.

He wound up at the University of Iowa, and at 19 entered a "Fresh Faces of Iowa" modeling competition on a whim -- the big prize was at trip to New York City, and he'd never been to the East Coast -- and won. Once he got to New York ("I had to get permission from the judge," he says, referring to the terms of his probation), he realized he could actually get work as a model and make some decent money, so he decided to stay, and chucked the whole engineering thing. Back home, people thought he was pretty much nuts.

"They thought I was making a pretty foolish choice, and they've since sort of told me that," he says. "And, in some ways, I probably was making a foolish choice. But most of the great things in the world come from really illogical decisions."

Like his marriage. "Absolutely 100 percent illogical" is how he describes his decision to get involved with Demi Moore in the spring of 2003. (They wed last September.)

Illogical?

"Well," he says, "I was 25 years old. I'm hosting 'Saturday Night Live.' I'm on the cover of Rolling Stone. I've got the number one movie in America ['Just Married']. Let's tie myself down! Let me really get tied down, right now!"

He leans in with a look that's part amusement, part self-satisfaction.

"I don't think, for most people, that would be a logical decision. And for me, it definitely wasn't a logical decision. But it's a decision that I couldn't help making."