Kiefer Sutherland on growing old, dying young and learning from his father

Perhaps insensitively, I’ve just asked the 56-year-old London-born actor about the onwards march of time. It’s over two decades since Sutherland first appeared as Jack Bauer in the internationally popular US espionage drama 24; now he’s fronting what Paramount is hoping will be another era-defining TV drama, Rabbit Hole. In the first episode, Sutherland is chased down a city street by a cop on horseback, in the second he’s beaten to the ground with a skateboard. He’s a grandad making an action series; the bumps and bangs must bruise a little more than they used to.

“It’s harder to be on the other end of it,” he admits. “For 10 years on 24 I learned how to attack. Now, everything’s in reverse, I have to defend. The guy I’m fighting is 30 years younger than me and you can see the excitement in his eyes. I’m thinking, ‘I’d better watch myself, because he might make a mistake and smack me in the mouth.’ But I still love it and you either get into it, or it’s just miserable for you. So I’m going to keep trying.”

Sutherland plays John Weir, a masterful exponent of corporate espionage suffering a near-baroque midlife crisis. Paradoxically, he enjoys the finest wines, whiskeys and even successful sexual encounters, but his every action is overshadowed by a growing existential dread. “Tired, stressed, I’m s**t”, is Weir’s response when his ex-wife asks how he feels. He channels this inner turmoil into immaculately planned, borderline legal stings that compromise major financial figures and shift zeros on the stock markets.

Then a series of extreme and inexplicable plot twists, much as if Franz Kafka were scripting Mission: Impossible, casts Weir into a nightmare world where surveillance networks and information technology are as much the enemy as the unknown forces that are out to kill him. He goes, as Sutherland puts it, “from the hunter to the hunted”. Along the way he becomes an unlikely hero.

Long ago, Sutherland was a villain. He gained worldwide attention, aged 20, as the odious bully Ace Merrill in Rob Reiner’s coming-of-age movie Stand by Me, opposite the young River Phoenix. Sutherland then went on to star in The Lost Boys, the 1987 film about motorcycling vampires in which he played chief bloodsucker David, dominating proceedings from the moment his Billy Idol-style quiff appeared on screen.

Then, in 1988, he was alongside Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen in Young Guns. Sutherland’s career soared but Phoenix’s came to an abrupt end in 1993, when he died of a drug overdose at Johnny Depp’s nightclub The Viper Room on Sunset Strip, aged just 23. “It was absolutely heartbreaking,” says Sutherland. “He had so much promise and was such a nice young man.” 30 years later, does he still think about it? “I think about it all the time.”

There have been other casualties from that period. Corey Haim, Sam in The Lost Boys, died of pneumonia at 38 after years of drug abuse. Haim’s friend Corey Feldman, also in The Lost Boys and Stand By Me, has publicly struggled with drug addiction. The fame game was brutal and played for the highest stakes.

“I have lost friends over the years,” Sutherland says. “And I don’t think anyone who’s lost someone doesn’t go, ‘Wow, 10 minutes either way and that could have been me.’ I am very mournful about some of the losses, and just that sense of ‘what a waste’, that this person could have been incredible.

“Hopefully, you learn from that stuff. But there’s a very dangerous, reckless abandon that is connected to youth. And if you’re pushing the edge of trying to experience life, and all the things that might come with it, there’s a chance that you’ll make a mistake – and those mistakes can be deadly.”

There have been four charges of drink driving for Sutherland over the years. One in 1989 was compounded by him carrying a concealed and loaded weapon; the last, in 2007, led to 48 days in jail in California. Otherwise, Sutherland, who has one daughter and one stepdaughter from his second marriage, to Camelia Kath, and two grandchildren, appears to have made it past the danger zone. “I was fortunate that I had children at such a young age [20] that I managed to get away from a bunch of other things that I think could have been very damaging for me,” he says. “I just feel lucky to have gotten through.”

As the son of Donald Sutherland, a major star who once illuminated the firmament of public life – not least in his affair with Jane Fonda – Sutherland might have been expected to dodge some of the more obvious pitfalls of being in the spotlight. But he has had his moments: the end of his engagement to Julia Roberts in 1991 was chronicled across the world’s tabloids – in particular, the claim that he was seeing a go-go dancer.

As Sutherland – presently engaged to American actor and model Cindy Vela – remembers it, his father gave him one piece of advice that was useful professionally and personally. “When I was 17 he said, ‘Don’t ever let them catch you lying.’ It took me a while to understand what that meant, but when I did, I was like, ‘Holy s**t! Why didn’t I pay attention to that?!’”

Sutherland’s father, now 87, separated from his mother, the Canadian actress Shirley Douglas, when he was a child. While father and son are by no means estranged, there is a sense of a relationship never quite had. “I think if there was a complaint from either one of us, it was that we didn’t get to spend enough time together.” Douglas, a political radical once arrested by the FBI while trying to buy hand grenades for the Black Panthers, died in 2020. “It was right at the start of lockdown,” he says. “I couldn’t get home [to Toronto] right away.” He missed the chance to say goodbye in person and the funeral service.

I wonder if losing his mother has shifted his focus towards the end of life. “I don’t think there’s any possible way out of this – we are going to die, and I’m on the downward slope towards that. The math is what the math is.

I don’t necessarily think, ‘Oh my God, can I just get to 85?’ We go when we go, and you just have to be as smart about it as you can, but stuff happens. And so, what I’ve actually ended up trying to do is take stock and [realise] how grateful I am about the life that I’ve had, that my children and my grandchildren are fine. And how lucky I am.

“If something were to happen, of course I would have liked to live longer, but I have to believe that on my last breath there will be a smile. Because I don’t know how else to show some respect for the gracious life that I’ve had the opportunity to live.”

Sutherland has that knack, a form of grace perhaps, of turning bad luck into good. So, when his career dipped at the end of the 1980s, he didn’t take a dive with it. “I had a really hot run, then everything slowed down,” he says. “So I got into ranching and cattle, and professional rodeoing. Taking that break might have been the smartest thing for me. I didn’t trot all over my own name, I just waited for something really special to come along. And it did – 24.”

Playing the character Jack Bauer brought Sutherland an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild awards. It was a show that caught the mood of an America that had been shocked to discover its own frailty on 9/11. Bauer was the US fighting back, no longer helpless in the face of assault. Did Sutherland feel like he was carrying the weight of a wounded nation on his shoulders?

“I always approached it as a television show, it certainly wasn’t meant as any mirror of 9/11 or instructions on how to behave,” he says. “9/11 was like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. You just couldn’t believe the images that you were seeing. People jumping from the towers, and the planes exploding into the buildings. I thought, ‘Well, we’re making a show with terrorists… There’s no way we can go forward and do this. It won’t work.’ And then a guy walked up to me about 10 days after 9/11 and said, ‘Man, I can’t wait to see the show.’

"I remember thinking, ‘How could you say something like that at a time like this?’ And then, five minutes later, ‘Well, how can you not say something like that.’ Entertainment is what gets us out and helps us move forward from really devastating moments in our life.”

He says the new series, Rabbit Hole, is a more obviously political work. “It’s an indictment on where we are as a society, that we have allowed technology and, unfortunately, unscrupulous people, to use technology to their benefit, and mislead and misguide huge sections of the population.”

The very first scene in the series is in the confessional box. Sutherland went to a Catholic school in Canada – has he kept the faith?

“I certainly take counsel with a higher being, trying to find a way to improve myself. In that sense, I have a strong sense of faith. But I don’t ask for anything. It’s not, ‘Oh, Lord, please give me this.’ For me, it’s about, ‘I made a big mistake last night and I’m not very happy with myself about that. How do I move forward?’

“The truth is, I’m not a moron, I know the difference between right and wrong. It’s just sometimes I’ve done the wrong thing.”

Rabbit Hole will be available to stream on Paramount Plus on Sunday 26th March.

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