'70s Show Star Quitting?

Topher Grace, 25, is best known for playing retro boy Eric Forman on the long-running Fox hitcom, That '70s Show. Over the past few years, though, he's been earning street cred with small parts in movies like Mona Lisa Smile and Traffic. Now, he's a lead in the current comedy, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!. Does the actor's big screen success mean his TV run will soon end?

"As long as you forgo having a social life, [doing both] is a piece of cake," Grace tells TV Guide Online. "It'll calm down, eventually. [Right now], I think it is so wonderful workwise, because I have this home base with '70s, where I have been working since I was a teenager.

"That was my first audition," he continues. "I was pulled out of a high school play for that show. And very few actors have this home base in Hollywood and then are able to go try something different and come back. It has been a wonderful kind of graduate school for acting. But next year is going to be the last year for me and Ashton [Kutcher], I think."

Although Grace plans on leaving his bell-bottoms behind, his old acquaintances are never forgotten. In Tad Hamilton, the object of his affection is played by Blue Crush cutie Kate Bosworth, who grew up in his hometown of Darien, Conn. Were they pals back in the day? "We knew of each other," he says. "I'm like four years older than Kate. I think I chaperoned a field trip that she was on once, and she and my sister were on the same soccer team. I knew her more when she came out to Hollywood.

"It is great working with people you know... as long as you like them," he adds. "You kind of speak the same language."

On the Tad Hamilton set, the language they all spoke was laughter. You've likely seen the film's silly trailer: Grace competes with hunky romantic rival Josh Duhamel (Las Vegas, All My Children) by shedding T-shirts to do some macho tasks. "We had a blast, but it was unfortunately kind of my idea to take off our shirts while chopping wood," he laments. "We did it in rehearsal and thought, 'Great.' But 30 minutes later, I'm in the body makeup trailer going, 'Uh-oh.'

"[Especially] looking over at Josh, who is jacked," Grace says with a sigh. "I'm working out like five days a week, by the way, but I don't think I could ever get there! But it is great, because there aren't even any words, and everyone gets what the joke is."