Johnnie WalkerWilmer Valderrama is hilarious, but he's also an activist and a visionary.
The 36-year-old actor was born in Miami, Florida, and then moved back to Venezuela with his family when he was three years old.
"I feel like there are three sides to me. I feel like a third of my heart is Colombian, a third of my heart is Venezuelan, and the other third, which has become my spirit and my soul, is of an American here in the United States."
It's because of this feeling that he joined the Keeping Walking America campaign by Johnnie Walker. "The campaign has an interesting responsibility for us to continue to retell our story and continuously be proud of our heritage," Valderrama said to E! News. "We must continue to walk in the shoes of who we are."
Just like the people that live in Brownsville, Texas, Valderrama is a mix of two bordering countries. "I think I have a fusion of both Colombia and Venezuela. I was raised in Venezuela, but I also spent half of my life in Colombia. You know this really gave me perspective, and I was able to come to America with both perspectives, it helped me to work as had as I have been since I got here. There are little differences," he explained. "Like two different arepas from both Venezuela and Colombia. It's kind of fun to have both."
After so many years of success with That '70s Show, the cast became a family and recently this family had a small reunion.
"When Ashton (Kutcher) and Danny (Masterson) thought of doing the Netflix series, The Ranch, they called me and said, ‘OK we're putting the band back together.' The show is very funny, but I was already locked into a number of things. So last year, they called me and asked if I just wanted to guest star and I said, ‘Hell yes, man. Let's go,'" Valderrama said. "The show has the same director, David Trainer, from 200 episodes of That ‘70s Show. So being able to be directed by him, who directed me since I was 18 years old until I was 26 and go from set to set with Danny and Ashton was so touching, so incredible."
Valderrama explained to us that it was as if they were back to just being a bunch of kids working together.
"They're people that know you better than anybody and to be able to laugh together again on a set is ridiculous. Let me put it like this, we're clowns and couldn't go through one take together and the director had to yell at us as if we were kids again. We couldn't get through a scene with a straight face. It was fun, to me, it doesn't feel like work it feels like a vacation."
But after That '70s Show the actor decided to take a break. He had basically lived so many years of his life in front of the camera and he felt he needed to grow as a person. When he asked him about what he took away from this Hollywood break, he said, "I think maturing, really becoming the man that I knew I could be personally, as a human and as a man. I really grew, I was able to really reconnect with my family, with my roots. I developed another passion which is entrepreneurship, and I built a whole studio, a movie studio and television studio. I'm producing multiple movies and TV shows and animation. I have two big animation productions coming up. One of them is the untold story of Prince Charming."
The actor and producer, who is inspired by the legendary Desi Arnaz, opened up about his upcoming project, which will feature very familiar faces.
"I partnered up with John Williams, he's the producer of the Shrek franchise. He's amazing. You know Disney took a long time to announce the first latin princess, so we decided to go ahead and make the first Latin prince and I decided to play him. I developed this incredible movie, cast the movie to the best that I could," he said. "Basically, I called all of my friends and said. I called Avril Lavigne, Demi Lovato, Ashley Tisdale, SIA, Patrick Stump, Steve Aoki, and so many more. It was just incredible to have them want to do it. So it became a monster movie and it kind of paved the road for the kind of projects that I was producing for my company.