Kiefer Sutherland: The Minute Man
Men's Vogue Jan/Feb 2007
By Tim Adams
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy
On 24 and on the ranch, Kiefer Sutherland lives life at full gallop. Rupert Murdoch pays him $10 million a season, and Bush's war council studies Jack Bauer's anti-terror tactics. It's no wonder Kiefer Sutherland has learned to make every second count.
On the twenty-first of December Kiefer Sutherland turned 40, but he has already tried on many lives for size. He's had two families to support (three if you count the crew of his television show, 24). He has lived out of the back of a Mustang on the beach, and on a 900-acre ranch in Montana. He is a father and a grandfather. He's been a Brat Packer and a rodeo champion. He has been famously lucky and infamously unlucky in love. He has a film production unit and an indie record label. He's made nearly 50 movies, but has known what it is like to sit by a phone that does not ring. Jude Cole, his best friend and business partner in the record label, tells me that Sutherland will never mellow. "I always think of him as Keith Richards the actor," he says. "There are very few human beings who can stand the punishment of working and playing that hard and always come back for more, but Kiefer is one."
When I meet him at his home in Los Angeles, Sutherland himself smiles at the idea. He puts his multiple lives down to a certain impatience; perhaps it's genetic-something he inherited from his wayward father, Donald Sutherland, or his charismatic grandfather, Canada's first socialist premier, Tommy Douglas. "I was always anxious to get going," Sutherland says of his early years, which felt like "a life out of a Rod Stewart song" at times. "I got married at 19, had kids early. But after a while you realize growing up is a lifelong process. Am I grown up now in the sense I can get up early, take my kids to school, go to work, get home? Yes. But are there much larger questions that I haven't been able to find any good answers to: how to be in love, or how to be on my own for any real period of time. Yes, I'm still working on those. I think those questions always come back to how you feel about yourself. Some days I feel good. Some days I wish things were different."
Today, I guess, is a good day, not least in that it is a rare day away from the set of 24 a 10-month-a-year, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day commitment. With the air of a truanting schoolboy, Sutherland takes me from his spectacular warehouse of a home on the rundown fringes of L.A.'s Silver Lake district to his favorite local Italian restaurant. Over lunch he laughs easily, enjoys the low cadences of his voice as he talks, slips outside occasionally for a drag on a cigarette. By 40, we all have the face we deserve. Kiefer Sutherland's is tanned, bright-eyed, lean. He has lost the puppy fat of his early Stand By Me years, which gave him a louche quality. Instead, he looks like Jack Bauer, his alter ego on 24, might look if he ever got a few good nights' sleep.
Bauer is as indelible a hero of our time as James Bond was of his; Sutherland describes his character as an action hero who is looking for some peace. "His marriage is failing, he's trying to protect his daughter, and he is saddled with these enormous responsibilities in his job that no single man can handle," he says. "So he is constantly set up to fail. People relate to that in a really strong way. It is how a lot of life makes us feel." Joel Surnow, a writer and co-creator of 24, says that "Kiefer was born to play Bauer," and in this sense you guess he is right. Sutherland brings all of his life to work: He knows Jack because in his own accelerated 40 years he has lived a good many of Jack's failings. Joel Schumacher, who has directed Sutherland in four films, most notably The Lost Boys, observes that he is "desperately afraid of being mediocre." Jon Cassar, his director on 24, suggests in turn that the series has become such high-bar television because "every day, Kiefer brings his complete A-game on set, and you better have yours too or you are just going to get blown away." When he works, they say, Sutherland works with every sinew. When he unwinds, he famously goes at it with the same determination.
He indulged some of these habits while sharing the ultimate 1980s party mansion with Robert Downey Jr., Billy Zane, and Sarah Jessica Parker, and he escaped from them too early, as it turned out into marriage and full-time fatherhood. His ongoing reputation for hard living is, he says, by necessity a little more myth than reality. He laughs wryly at a Rolling Stone article that depicted him as viewing the world through the bottom of a whiskey glass. "24 must make itself while I am out in a bar somewhere. We have made 128 episodes. That's the equivalent of 65 films in a five-and-a-half-year period. That is as much as most actors' entire career. I maybe deserve to get drunk just once in a while. But I have never once been late for a day's work."
Cole says of Sutherland's involvement in their music business, Ironworks, that "he is in and out, but when he is in, he is all in. I'll call him on set, and he'll drop Jack Bauer for a few minutes, attend to a problem, and then go straight back into character mid-sentence. As a result, he guards the time he has to himself; he needs to cut loose occasionally and ignore what anyone thinks." The actor Julian Sands, who played the villain Vladimir Bierko in Day 5 of 24, describes Sutherland as "being in the skin of every moment there is no slack with him at all." Sands had known Sutherland for a while "we shared watering holes that we can happily forget, back in the day" and believes that "for all the comfort zone he has now created, for all the success of 24, he keeps things incredibly raw, both as an actor and as a man."
A part of Kiefer Sutherland still relishes an outlaw image though it sits uneasily with his schedule. He talks a lot in interviews of his time playing pool at the then lowlife Hollywood Billiards club. (It was at the pool table, in 1991, that he befriended an aspiring actress named Amanda Rice, only a few months before his proposed wedding to Julia Roberts; that friendship, it was widely reported at that time, apparently prompted Roberts to rehearse her role in Runaway Bride.) These days he does his best to keep an edge to a life that sees him earning $23 million a year. He lives near Silver Lake instead of Malibu, and suggests his home is a front line for Salvadoran and Ukrainian gangs who use its security gates to mark their territory with graffiti tags.
Behind the spray-painted protective ironwork, a world away from the East Hollywood turf wars, Sutherland has constructed a set designer's bachelor fantasy: The derelict old foundry he bought five years ago is now halogen-lit, punctuated by large leather sofas, and equipped with a purpose-built music studio that is racked with nearly 60 guitars; he can play a bit, but the studio is not an indulgence: He takes the bands contracted to the Ironworks label very seriously, and he believes it gives him a way of connecting with the street outside. "It can be dangerous around here," he says he was recently mugged at gunpoint but he feels at home with its authenticity. "It's a proper neighborhood. Until 11 o'clock at night you have the grandmothers out on the sidewalk cooking barbecues for the kids."
If he ever feels hemmed in by the city, Sutherland knows how he can escape. The ranch he owned in central California was once the location of his bravest, and smartest, career move. For all the highs he is experiencing now on 24, the days of such forgettable movies as Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990) and The Last Days of Frankie the Fly (1997) are not that far in the past. When I ask what the lowest moments of his career have been, Sutherland shrugs, offers a low laugh, and says, "The nineties." The very public break-up with Roberts did not help. And maybe his roles stranded him between high school rebel and complex leading man. He won't name films, but there were, he admits, several at the beginning of the decade where he would look over at his co-star and ask, "How many fucking things went wrong for you to get here with me?" He knew if he did a couple more films like that, his career was "dead, dead, dead."
So in 1998, he took time off to ride horses; he had picked up the basics on his film The Cowboy Way, and he learned fast. "Those two years on the ranch were my college years," he says. "Three or four guys riding round in a truck from rodeo to rodeo. It was fantastic." Sutherland is genuinely modest, but this masks a formidable sense of purpose. Of his rodeo career, which saw him win the national team roping competition twice, he suggests he was really a glorified groom, shoveling manure half the time. John English, his roping partner in those victories, disagrees. "Kiefer was accepted very quickly by the other cowboys," he tells me. "He's a mild-mannered guy, but he was as aggressive as any of them once he got out there. They appreciated that." Sutherland will only admit, "What I lacked as a roper and a cowboy I could make up for in horses. Roping is one of those sports like polo where you get infinitely better the better your horses are. I had some great horses."
If anything trained him for the grueling schedule of 24, it was his life in the saddle. Director Jon Cassar marvels at the physical shape that allows Sutherland to work as intensely as he does. The actor says he started working out regularly a few months before season one. "I'm as vain as anyone else," he suggests. "I saw one of those photos where I was jumping off the diving board with one of my kids. I guess I forgot to suck in my stomach. Holy shit! I work out most days before I go on set: three or four quick seven-minute miles, lots of push-ups and sit-ups. Some days I have to be at the lot at 4:30 a.m., and I can't do it. If that's the case, I don't wake up in the same way all day." He rides and skis when he can, and he plays a Sunday night ice hockey pick-up game, which has proved, he says, at least a good way to meet most of the 600,000 other Canadians who live in L.A. Otherwise, he just keeps fit by saving the world several times an hour.
Sutherland has won a lot of awards for 24, including an Emmy last year, but the most gratification comes through the stories he hears. He remembers talking to a couple who had just returned to L.A. after an intimate weekend in Paris. They had watched a season of 24 during the 13-hour flight over. "They got there and tried to go out to this special dinner but instead rushed back and watched the other 11 hours in their hotel room. Ruined the most romantic holiday they'd ever had. I asked why they didn't save the rest for the plane home. They said they couldn't wait that long."
He is proud, too, of the way that 24 seems so close to the political pulse of the country. "When someone like Barbra Streisand, speaking to an audience of Democrats, can use 24 to get a point across and Rush Limbaugh can do the same thing [to Republicans], you know you are on to something." Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are reputedly avid fans. On the day after the arrest of seven terrorist suspects in Miami last June, hapless Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff spoke at a meeting of the right-wing Heritage Foundation on the subject of Jack Bauer's counter-terrorism initiatives. 24 offered disturbing parallels with real life, he suggested. "In simple terms the characters are always trying to make the best choice out of a series of unpalatable alternatives. That is what we do every day." Crucially, Chertoff said, it also examined "what you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake . . ."
Historians looking to catch the mood of the early twenty-first century could, in any case, do worse than watch the eventful days of 24 Cassar says they plan to make it a week before they quit, probably to make Bauer movies. Some of this is about serendipity. 24 began with the uncanny prescience of a plane being blown out of a sky by a terrorist; the scene was used for a trailer that was circulated to the press in the week before September 11, 2001.
As the hours and years have passed, the series has offered addictive dramatic suspense while staying close to our deepest fears: the paranoia of terrorism, the extreme circumstances when torture could be argued permissible, the dangers of a rogue president. The politicians love it because it makes the threat tangible every week and shows a resourceful American coming out on top. The audience loves it because it plays out scenarios of the worst that can happen and provides a context in which to contain nightmares.
Sutherland is currently shooting "Day Six," which takes up with Bauer's imprisonment on a slow boat to China. More than ever, the actor believes this season's episodes will make a powerful argument about the state of the union, with Bauer as a target of his own country's law enforcers. "The writers are not all Democrats and not all Republicans, but they manage to get through all the crap to a consensus," he says. "This time it is a very interesting statement of what we are prepared to allow to happen. I don't mean in going to war, but in standing up for your principles and ideals."
This kind of engagement, it seems, is of critical importance to Sutherland because he is still trying to live up to his family. Not to his famous father, these days, but more to his mother, the actress Shirley Douglas, and his grandfather. The firebrand architect of Canada's health care system, a mesmerizing orator, and a great man of the people, Tommy Douglas was recently voted the Greatest Canadian of All Time by more than a million people in a nationwide poll. He, and not the actor's mostly absent dad who split from Shirley Douglas when Kiefer was three was the formative male influence in his childhood.
"When people talk about me living up to my dad, it is about acting, really. They don't know him beyond that. With my grandfather, that's another thing. He was one of those rare people who not only had the passion and conviction to change things for the better, but he also could take people with him." I had read a bit about Tommy Douglas before meeting Sutherland and quote a couple of his famous lines: "I don't mind being a symbol but I don't want to become a monument. I've seen what the pigeons do to monuments . . ." The grandson smiles. "I have tried to take all of that in, of course," he says. "There are days I can feel him smiling down at me, saying, 'You are doing all right.' There are other days when I can hear him saying, 'Boy, that was bad.' "
Sutherland, along with his twin sister, Rachel, was sent to stay with his grandparents every summer outside Ottawa, on a river used for shipping logs. His grandfather taught him to drive, gave him the self-confidence his father was not on hand to give and also cut him some slack. "My mother would get cross with me for not trying at school. And my grandfather would sit pretty calmly and tell me, 'You're doing fine.' "
Now that Sutherland is an extremely youthful grandfather himself, which is another way he has gotten ahead of himself, he senses that such wisdom comes with the territory. From his first marriage, to Camelia Kath, he has a stepdaughter, and she has recently had a son, whom he refers to as his grandson. (Sutherland also has a daughter of his own with Kath, and is helping to raise the two sons of his second wife, model Kelly Winn). "My grandson is only one-and-a-half years old," he says. "But my interaction with him is already so different from that with my two daughters. This need to tell them what to do just doesn't exist. That is a parent's job. My job, I see, is just to let him be."
Having been set on course by his grandfather's benevolent presence, Sutherland has found a lot of his subsequent strength of purpose in the example of his mother, who carried on her father's work. "The way you choose to live your life, that's your politics," he says. "I can talk about socialized health care until I am blue in the face. The truth is I have x amount of dollars in a bank account for myself. My mother went to prison for her beliefs. She is one of the key reasons why health care in Canada is still alive. She is of the key reasons why there were breakfast programs across Los Angeles run by the Black Panther party that showed black and Hispanic children were performing poorly at school because they were not getting fed properly before they went."
What does his mother, who lives in Toronto, make of 24? "Every year she starts to watch it," he says. "But it's always the same. I get a call two or three episodes in: 'Honey, I tried, I really tried, honest, but I just got so goddamn nervous I had to turn the fucking thing off.' "
If his mother gives him plenty to strive toward now, you can't help feeling that it was his father who was the source of most of Sutherland's early anxiety, his precocious desire to prove himself a man. It wasn't until he was 18 and watched M*A*S*H and Don't Look Now and Klute on a friend's VCR that he properly realized who his dad was. The young man phoned his old man to say he had never known how brilliant he was. (Sutherland senior has since returned the compliment over his son's performance in 24.) The Oscar-winning Ordinary People in particular, in which Donald Sutherland tried to commune with his suicidal son (played by Timothy Hutton), had a profound effect on the teenage Kiefer: "One day I'd like to have a conversation like that with my dad," he recalls having thought.
Now with two failed marriages of his own behind him, he is more inclined to understand his father. "He has this restaurant on the West Side of New York that he likes a lot, and I go and meet him there. It's like going to meet the Don, you know. He has his own corner booth. And he fills it because he's a big guy. And there's low lighting and he commands a kind of authority, he's 6'4". So I show up, always the same place, and we have a good time."
Most men, as they get older, grow more like their fathers, but Sutherland has never known anything different. "It shows itself in very different ways. I dropped him off at the airport one time. I was telling him about this girlfriend I had. I'd gone out with her, broke up, then gone back with her. The second I said that, he said: 'I used to do that too!' " It's odd, genetics.
He says he probably should have worked some of this out in therapy, but he never went that route. "For me I always got more from jumping on a horse and taking off into a canyon for a couple of hours to figure stuff out. The answers are generally very simple: You're in a relationship and it is not working out, but you don't want to split up with the person because you don't want them to stop liking you. Grow up."
The hardest time for him emotionally, he says, was not when Julia Roberts ran off to Ireland with his friend Jason Patric Sutherland was only 24 at the time but when his later marriage, to Kelly Winn, broke down. "We were both surprised that it didn't work out. We are still close. But I guess I am much better at being a friend than being a husband." I ask if he imagines himself in a long-term relationship again. "There are some people that are great loners," he says, "but it is certainly not how I wanted to live my life. When you have five 16-hour days back to back, though, it is tough to tell someone, 'The only way you can spend time with me is to live with me.' It's certainly a weird question to ask on a first date."
He sees a lot of his daughters, and what he misses by living alone he makes up for with the family that has evolved on the television program. 24 has allowed him to prove to himself what he has always perhaps doubted: that he is capable of long-term commitment. "We've been together a long time now," he says of the show. "You have babies being born. You've got fathers dying. We argue all the time. But," Sutherland suggests, lapsing into Jack Bauer for a moment, "they have always made me feel like they have my back. And I believe I have theirs."
For the moment that seems to be enough. Does he ever feel he is sacrificing too much of himself to that commitment? "Well," he says, "the way I see it, I live at 24, and they sometimes let me come home to sleep."
On the twenty-first of December Kiefer Sutherland turned 40, but he has already tried on many lives for size. He's had two families to support (three if you count the crew of his television show, 24). He has lived out of the back of a Mustang on the beach, and on a 900-acre ranch in Montana. He is a father and a grandfather. He's been a Brat Packer and a rodeo champion. He has been famously lucky and infamously unlucky in love. He has a film production unit and an indie record label. He's made nearly 50 movies, but has known what it is like to sit by a phone that does not ring. Jude Cole, his best friend and business partner in the record label, tells me that Sutherland will never mellow. "I always think of him as Keith Richards the actor," he says. "There are very few human beings who can stand the punishment of working and playing that hard and always come back for more, but Kiefer is one."
When I meet him at his home in Los Angeles, Sutherland himself smiles at the idea. He puts his multiple lives down to a certain impatience; perhaps it's genetic-something he inherited from his wayward father, Donald Sutherland, or his charismatic grandfather, Canada's first socialist premier, Tommy Douglas. "I was always anxious to get going," Sutherland says of his early years, which felt like "a life out of a Rod Stewart song" at times. "I got married at 19, had kids early. But after a while you realize growing up is a lifelong process. Am I grown up now in the sense I can get up early, take my kids to school, go to work, get home? Yes. But are there much larger questions that I haven't been able to find any good answers to: how to be in love, or how to be on my own for any real period of time. Yes, I'm still working on those. I think those questions always come back to how you feel about yourself. Some days I feel good. Some days I wish things were different."
Today, I guess, is a good day, not least in that it is a rare day away from the set of 24 a 10-month-a-year, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day commitment. With the air of a truanting schoolboy, Sutherland takes me from his spectacular warehouse of a home on the rundown fringes of L.A.'s Silver Lake district to his favorite local Italian restaurant. Over lunch he laughs easily, enjoys the low cadences of his voice as he talks, slips outside occasionally for a drag on a cigarette. By 40, we all have the face we deserve. Kiefer Sutherland's is tanned, bright-eyed, lean. He has lost the puppy fat of his early Stand By Me years, which gave him a louche quality. Instead, he looks like Jack Bauer, his alter ego on 24, might look if he ever got a few good nights' sleep.
Bauer is as indelible a hero of our time as James Bond was of his; Sutherland describes his character as an action hero who is looking for some peace. "His marriage is failing, he's trying to protect his daughter, and he is saddled with these enormous responsibilities in his job that no single man can handle," he says. "So he is constantly set up to fail. People relate to that in a really strong way. It is how a lot of life makes us feel." Joel Surnow, a writer and co-creator of 24, says that "Kiefer was born to play Bauer," and in this sense you guess he is right. Sutherland brings all of his life to work: He knows Jack because in his own accelerated 40 years he has lived a good many of Jack's failings. Joel Schumacher, who has directed Sutherland in four films, most notably The Lost Boys, observes that he is "desperately afraid of being mediocre." Jon Cassar, his director on 24, suggests in turn that the series has become such high-bar television because "every day, Kiefer brings his complete A-game on set, and you better have yours too or you are just going to get blown away." When he works, they say, Sutherland works with every sinew. When he unwinds, he famously goes at it with the same determination.
He indulged some of these habits while sharing the ultimate 1980s party mansion with Robert Downey Jr., Billy Zane, and Sarah Jessica Parker, and he escaped from them too early, as it turned out into marriage and full-time fatherhood. His ongoing reputation for hard living is, he says, by necessity a little more myth than reality. He laughs wryly at a Rolling Stone article that depicted him as viewing the world through the bottom of a whiskey glass. "24 must make itself while I am out in a bar somewhere. We have made 128 episodes. That's the equivalent of 65 films in a five-and-a-half-year period. That is as much as most actors' entire career. I maybe deserve to get drunk just once in a while. But I have never once been late for a day's work."
Cole says of Sutherland's involvement in their music business, Ironworks, that "he is in and out, but when he is in, he is all in. I'll call him on set, and he'll drop Jack Bauer for a few minutes, attend to a problem, and then go straight back into character mid-sentence. As a result, he guards the time he has to himself; he needs to cut loose occasionally and ignore what anyone thinks." The actor Julian Sands, who played the villain Vladimir Bierko in Day 5 of 24, describes Sutherland as "being in the skin of every moment there is no slack with him at all." Sands had known Sutherland for a while "we shared watering holes that we can happily forget, back in the day" and believes that "for all the comfort zone he has now created, for all the success of 24, he keeps things incredibly raw, both as an actor and as a man."
A part of Kiefer Sutherland still relishes an outlaw image though it sits uneasily with his schedule. He talks a lot in interviews of his time playing pool at the then lowlife Hollywood Billiards club. (It was at the pool table, in 1991, that he befriended an aspiring actress named Amanda Rice, only a few months before his proposed wedding to Julia Roberts; that friendship, it was widely reported at that time, apparently prompted Roberts to rehearse her role in Runaway Bride.) These days he does his best to keep an edge to a life that sees him earning $23 million a year. He lives near Silver Lake instead of Malibu, and suggests his home is a front line for Salvadoran and Ukrainian gangs who use its security gates to mark their territory with graffiti tags.
Behind the spray-painted protective ironwork, a world away from the East Hollywood turf wars, Sutherland has constructed a set designer's bachelor fantasy: The derelict old foundry he bought five years ago is now halogen-lit, punctuated by large leather sofas, and equipped with a purpose-built music studio that is racked with nearly 60 guitars; he can play a bit, but the studio is not an indulgence: He takes the bands contracted to the Ironworks label very seriously, and he believes it gives him a way of connecting with the street outside. "It can be dangerous around here," he says he was recently mugged at gunpoint but he feels at home with its authenticity. "It's a proper neighborhood. Until 11 o'clock at night you have the grandmothers out on the sidewalk cooking barbecues for the kids."
If he ever feels hemmed in by the city, Sutherland knows how he can escape. The ranch he owned in central California was once the location of his bravest, and smartest, career move. For all the highs he is experiencing now on 24, the days of such forgettable movies as Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990) and The Last Days of Frankie the Fly (1997) are not that far in the past. When I ask what the lowest moments of his career have been, Sutherland shrugs, offers a low laugh, and says, "The nineties." The very public break-up with Roberts did not help. And maybe his roles stranded him between high school rebel and complex leading man. He won't name films, but there were, he admits, several at the beginning of the decade where he would look over at his co-star and ask, "How many fucking things went wrong for you to get here with me?" He knew if he did a couple more films like that, his career was "dead, dead, dead."
So in 1998, he took time off to ride horses; he had picked up the basics on his film The Cowboy Way, and he learned fast. "Those two years on the ranch were my college years," he says. "Three or four guys riding round in a truck from rodeo to rodeo. It was fantastic." Sutherland is genuinely modest, but this masks a formidable sense of purpose. Of his rodeo career, which saw him win the national team roping competition twice, he suggests he was really a glorified groom, shoveling manure half the time. John English, his roping partner in those victories, disagrees. "Kiefer was accepted very quickly by the other cowboys," he tells me. "He's a mild-mannered guy, but he was as aggressive as any of them once he got out there. They appreciated that." Sutherland will only admit, "What I lacked as a roper and a cowboy I could make up for in horses. Roping is one of those sports like polo where you get infinitely better the better your horses are. I had some great horses."
If anything trained him for the grueling schedule of 24, it was his life in the saddle. Director Jon Cassar marvels at the physical shape that allows Sutherland to work as intensely as he does. The actor says he started working out regularly a few months before season one. "I'm as vain as anyone else," he suggests. "I saw one of those photos where I was jumping off the diving board with one of my kids. I guess I forgot to suck in my stomach. Holy shit! I work out most days before I go on set: three or four quick seven-minute miles, lots of push-ups and sit-ups. Some days I have to be at the lot at 4:30 a.m., and I can't do it. If that's the case, I don't wake up in the same way all day." He rides and skis when he can, and he plays a Sunday night ice hockey pick-up game, which has proved, he says, at least a good way to meet most of the 600,000 other Canadians who live in L.A. Otherwise, he just keeps fit by saving the world several times an hour.
Sutherland has won a lot of awards for 24, including an Emmy last year, but the most gratification comes through the stories he hears. He remembers talking to a couple who had just returned to L.A. after an intimate weekend in Paris. They had watched a season of 24 during the 13-hour flight over. "They got there and tried to go out to this special dinner but instead rushed back and watched the other 11 hours in their hotel room. Ruined the most romantic holiday they'd ever had. I asked why they didn't save the rest for the plane home. They said they couldn't wait that long."
He is proud, too, of the way that 24 seems so close to the political pulse of the country. "When someone like Barbra Streisand, speaking to an audience of Democrats, can use 24 to get a point across and Rush Limbaugh can do the same thing [to Republicans], you know you are on to something." Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are reputedly avid fans. On the day after the arrest of seven terrorist suspects in Miami last June, hapless Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff spoke at a meeting of the right-wing Heritage Foundation on the subject of Jack Bauer's counter-terrorism initiatives. 24 offered disturbing parallels with real life, he suggested. "In simple terms the characters are always trying to make the best choice out of a series of unpalatable alternatives. That is what we do every day." Crucially, Chertoff said, it also examined "what you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake . . ."
Historians looking to catch the mood of the early twenty-first century could, in any case, do worse than watch the eventful days of 24 Cassar says they plan to make it a week before they quit, probably to make Bauer movies. Some of this is about serendipity. 24 began with the uncanny prescience of a plane being blown out of a sky by a terrorist; the scene was used for a trailer that was circulated to the press in the week before September 11, 2001.
As the hours and years have passed, the series has offered addictive dramatic suspense while staying close to our deepest fears: the paranoia of terrorism, the extreme circumstances when torture could be argued permissible, the dangers of a rogue president. The politicians love it because it makes the threat tangible every week and shows a resourceful American coming out on top. The audience loves it because it plays out scenarios of the worst that can happen and provides a context in which to contain nightmares.
Sutherland is currently shooting "Day Six," which takes up with Bauer's imprisonment on a slow boat to China. More than ever, the actor believes this season's episodes will make a powerful argument about the state of the union, with Bauer as a target of his own country's law enforcers. "The writers are not all Democrats and not all Republicans, but they manage to get through all the crap to a consensus," he says. "This time it is a very interesting statement of what we are prepared to allow to happen. I don't mean in going to war, but in standing up for your principles and ideals."
This kind of engagement, it seems, is of critical importance to Sutherland because he is still trying to live up to his family. Not to his famous father, these days, but more to his mother, the actress Shirley Douglas, and his grandfather. The firebrand architect of Canada's health care system, a mesmerizing orator, and a great man of the people, Tommy Douglas was recently voted the Greatest Canadian of All Time by more than a million people in a nationwide poll. He, and not the actor's mostly absent dad who split from Shirley Douglas when Kiefer was three was the formative male influence in his childhood.
"When people talk about me living up to my dad, it is about acting, really. They don't know him beyond that. With my grandfather, that's another thing. He was one of those rare people who not only had the passion and conviction to change things for the better, but he also could take people with him." I had read a bit about Tommy Douglas before meeting Sutherland and quote a couple of his famous lines: "I don't mind being a symbol but I don't want to become a monument. I've seen what the pigeons do to monuments . . ." The grandson smiles. "I have tried to take all of that in, of course," he says. "There are days I can feel him smiling down at me, saying, 'You are doing all right.' There are other days when I can hear him saying, 'Boy, that was bad.' "
Sutherland, along with his twin sister, Rachel, was sent to stay with his grandparents every summer outside Ottawa, on a river used for shipping logs. His grandfather taught him to drive, gave him the self-confidence his father was not on hand to give and also cut him some slack. "My mother would get cross with me for not trying at school. And my grandfather would sit pretty calmly and tell me, 'You're doing fine.' "
Now that Sutherland is an extremely youthful grandfather himself, which is another way he has gotten ahead of himself, he senses that such wisdom comes with the territory. From his first marriage, to Camelia Kath, he has a stepdaughter, and she has recently had a son, whom he refers to as his grandson. (Sutherland also has a daughter of his own with Kath, and is helping to raise the two sons of his second wife, model Kelly Winn). "My grandson is only one-and-a-half years old," he says. "But my interaction with him is already so different from that with my two daughters. This need to tell them what to do just doesn't exist. That is a parent's job. My job, I see, is just to let him be."
Having been set on course by his grandfather's benevolent presence, Sutherland has found a lot of his subsequent strength of purpose in the example of his mother, who carried on her father's work. "The way you choose to live your life, that's your politics," he says. "I can talk about socialized health care until I am blue in the face. The truth is I have x amount of dollars in a bank account for myself. My mother went to prison for her beliefs. She is one of the key reasons why health care in Canada is still alive. She is of the key reasons why there were breakfast programs across Los Angeles run by the Black Panther party that showed black and Hispanic children were performing poorly at school because they were not getting fed properly before they went."
What does his mother, who lives in Toronto, make of 24? "Every year she starts to watch it," he says. "But it's always the same. I get a call two or three episodes in: 'Honey, I tried, I really tried, honest, but I just got so goddamn nervous I had to turn the fucking thing off.' "
If his mother gives him plenty to strive toward now, you can't help feeling that it was his father who was the source of most of Sutherland's early anxiety, his precocious desire to prove himself a man. It wasn't until he was 18 and watched M*A*S*H and Don't Look Now and Klute on a friend's VCR that he properly realized who his dad was. The young man phoned his old man to say he had never known how brilliant he was. (Sutherland senior has since returned the compliment over his son's performance in 24.) The Oscar-winning Ordinary People in particular, in which Donald Sutherland tried to commune with his suicidal son (played by Timothy Hutton), had a profound effect on the teenage Kiefer: "One day I'd like to have a conversation like that with my dad," he recalls having thought.
Now with two failed marriages of his own behind him, he is more inclined to understand his father. "He has this restaurant on the West Side of New York that he likes a lot, and I go and meet him there. It's like going to meet the Don, you know. He has his own corner booth. And he fills it because he's a big guy. And there's low lighting and he commands a kind of authority, he's 6'4". So I show up, always the same place, and we have a good time."
Most men, as they get older, grow more like their fathers, but Sutherland has never known anything different. "It shows itself in very different ways. I dropped him off at the airport one time. I was telling him about this girlfriend I had. I'd gone out with her, broke up, then gone back with her. The second I said that, he said: 'I used to do that too!' " It's odd, genetics.
He says he probably should have worked some of this out in therapy, but he never went that route. "For me I always got more from jumping on a horse and taking off into a canyon for a couple of hours to figure stuff out. The answers are generally very simple: You're in a relationship and it is not working out, but you don't want to split up with the person because you don't want them to stop liking you. Grow up."
The hardest time for him emotionally, he says, was not when Julia Roberts ran off to Ireland with his friend Jason Patric Sutherland was only 24 at the time but when his later marriage, to Kelly Winn, broke down. "We were both surprised that it didn't work out. We are still close. But I guess I am much better at being a friend than being a husband." I ask if he imagines himself in a long-term relationship again. "There are some people that are great loners," he says, "but it is certainly not how I wanted to live my life. When you have five 16-hour days back to back, though, it is tough to tell someone, 'The only way you can spend time with me is to live with me.' It's certainly a weird question to ask on a first date."
He sees a lot of his daughters, and what he misses by living alone he makes up for with the family that has evolved on the television program. 24 has allowed him to prove to himself what he has always perhaps doubted: that he is capable of long-term commitment. "We've been together a long time now," he says of the show. "You have babies being born. You've got fathers dying. We argue all the time. But," Sutherland suggests, lapsing into Jack Bauer for a moment, "they have always made me feel like they have my back. And I believe I have theirs."
For the moment that seems to be enough. Does he ever feel he is sacrificing too much of himself to that commitment? "Well," he says, "the way I see it, I live at 24, and they sometimes let me come home to sleep."
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