After 24, the roles I anticipated didn’t come: Sutherland

Louis Chilton, The Independent

I’m sliding into 60 years old at 100 miles an hour,” says sprightly 58-year-old Kiefer Sutherland, “and I’m acutely aware of the fact that people cared more about what I thought when I was 30 than they do now.” Whether or not this is true, it’s a fear that Sutherland — upstart son-of-a-legend turned all-action TV icon in the guise of 24’s Jack Bauer – has harnessed to compelling effect in recent years. It’s something he interrogated when he gave what may have been a career-best performance in 2023, playing a pitiful naval commander in William Friedkin’s final film The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. “Everything about that character came down to being marginalised,” he says. “What happens when you hit an age in life when you’re redundant, when you don’t matter, when no one cares what you think. And when I put aspects of my own personal feelings into the character, for the first time, I felt empathy for him.”

Sutherland, to be fair, doesn’t really seem like one either. He’s talking to me ahead of the release of Tinsel Town, a Christmas comedy dripping with self-parody in which he plays a Hollywood action star shanghaied into the Yorkshire Christmas panto scene. His character, Brad Mack, is a showbiz blowhard, whose dormant soft side takes some belligerent prompting — from his semi-estranged daughter, and a choreographer played by Rebel Wilson — to emerge. “The Brits do this kind of movie better than anybody,” says Sutherland. “Like The Full Monty... it’s just that small-town, heartfelt English story. “There is always going to be the kind of archetypical impression of a Hollywood actor,” he adds, “and that’s fun to play and lean into. But as funny as all that stuff was, (Mack) becoming a better version of himself through his daughter was something that touched me personally.” Sutherland’s own daughter, Veep actor Sarah Sutherland, was born into his first marriage, with actor-writer Camelia Kath. “You start to believe, for yourself, that you have an insight worth sharing.”

Over the phone, Sutherland comes across as knowledgeable, sincere, and piquantly opinionated. A panto-based musical comedy was something of a hard leftfield lurch for the actor (“there were a few people in Los Angeles that were pretty surprised”), but he was drawn to the sheer tea-and-crumpets Britishness of it. Born in London in 1966, Sutherland admits to having a “romantic notion” of the UK — and it’s one that’s been reciprocated. “All the times I’ve visited the UK, there’s a part of me that feels like this is where I’m from,” he says. “I don’t know how to articulate this, but... people have been really supportive of me here.”

It is also we Brits, he suggests, who were responsible for the success of his golden goose, 24. “The series took about a year and a half to take off in the United States,” he explains, “while it caught fire in the UK almost immediately. Had it not been for the UK, there might very well have not been a season two.” There was, of course, a second season, then another seven seasons (and a film) after that, ossifying the realtime counterterrorism drama as one of TV’s biggest shows.

Sutherland moved away from Britain as an infant in 1968, when his parents, Canadian actors Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, relocated to California; after their divorce, he lived with his mother in Toronto. What’s always been fascinating, I say, is just how different Sutherland is from his late father as an actor, despite their striking resemblance.

Donald, the revered star of seminal films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and M*A*S*H, always had a sort of dishevelled charm about him, an innate, only half-suppressed wildness. His son, meanwhile, has always been brittler: whether it’s Jack Bauer or Ace, the menacing hoodlum in Stand by Me, Sutherland’s characters are often men stretched taut by temperament or circumstance. It’s why those people who were eager to fan-cast Sutherland in his late father’s role for the new Hunger Games prequel are so off-base: yes, they look alike, but the vibes could hardly be more distinct.

This, Sutherland suggests, is down to his “mum” (pronounced closer to the English way than the Americanised “mom”), a “really gifted theatre actor” in her own right. “At a very early age, my twin sister and I would finish school and go to the theatre,” he says. “And we’d do our homework, my mum would do her performance, and then we’d go home. And so I was exposed to that at a very early age.