Ashton Kutcher is a diehard University of Iowa football fan.
So much so, in fact, that the Ranch actor wants to name his second child with Mila Kunis after the school's mascot. "There was a rallying cry from a collective that believed in the name Hawkeye," he said on Conan Wednesday. "I'm an Iowan, so to have a kid named Hawkeye?"
Plus, Ashton said, "It's like M.A.S.H.! Like, he could be a doctor!" He was referring to Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce, played by Donald Sutherland in the 1970 film and Alan Alda in the TV series. But Hawkeye "didn't fly" with his wife. "It didn't cross the Mila threshold," said Ashton, who welcomed Wyatt in 2014. "It came to the threshold, but then it got knocked down."
So, what will the couple call their baby boy?
"We have a name dialed in that we've had for a while," Ashton revealed to host Conan O'Brien. "But the problem is, if you get the name too soon, suddenly there's like slight trepidation about the name. The other day, Mila was like, 'So, you still like the name?' And I was like, 'Yeah.' And she was like, 'Why was it the high pitch yeah? Why wasn't it the low pitch yeah?' Then I was like, 'Well, you like the name, right?' She was like, 'Yeah.' Like, 'Why did you say it like that?'"
The couple's back-and-forth became very confusing. "Now we're like, 'Maybe we don't love the name,' even though we both love the name!" he said with a laugh. "So, I think we have a name."
Ashton made just one guarantee: his son won't share a name with any of his childhood bullies. "You don't want names of people that remind you of people who used to beat you up," he explained. "That's not good. It has to be some egregious thing where they were really a jerk."
When Ashton appeared on Conan in 2014, less than a month after Wyatt's birth, the actor revealed how his daughter got her unique moniker. "We had another name. We had it picked out and we're like, 'All right this is the name.' Then we got pregnant a week—a couple weeks after we picked the name. But then when we were pregnant, the name just didn't fit the energy that we were feeling," he said. "We were calling it the baby, but never by the name that we had given it. One night Mila was just like, 'This is not the name!' I'm like, 'OK! It's not the name.'"
Undeterred, Ashton said, "I had to get the creative juices going."
Once Ashton got going, he couldn't stop. "We were going to a Lakers game and I've got name Tourette's. I just started listing off anything and everything that I saw. I was like, 'Sign! Truck! Wall! Door!' She's like, 'Shut up!' I'm like, 'If you don't accept my bad ideas, you'll never accept the good ones.' Then I was like, 'All right I've got a really dumb idea. What about Wyatt?'" the actor recalled. "She goes, 'That's it.' I was like, 'Really? I did it?' She was like, 'Yeah, that's it.'"