Kiefer Sutherland: Heart of Darkness

"Oh, yeah," he says immediately. "The first time I was seven, because my mother was concerned that damage might have been done to me by the disruption in our family."

"And was there?"

"I don't think so. Some other people might disagree. But I don't think there was."

And yet he does seem driven to try to successfully complete what his parents couldn't and, like them, has always ended up failing. He first got married when he was twenty, to actress Camelia Kath -- they had a daughter, Sarah Jude, now eighteen -- but the marriage lasted less than two years, reportedly falling apart when he couldn't manage to stay out of bars and the arms of other women. He flung himself in there again, in 1996, with former model Kelly Winn, but separated from her after four years, for basically the same reasons. And then in between those two unions was his ill-fated engagement to Julia Roberts, whom he met while making Flatliners in 1990. They were the ultimate Hollywood couple, the Brad and Angelina of their day. Three days before their wedding, however, she called it off and flew to Europe with Kiefer's then best friend, Jason Patric, unleashing a shitstorm of lurid tabloid-type press -- allegedly, Kiefer had been carrying on with a stripper, which he denies -- and also ensuring that in all stories about him to follow, he'd be called upon to comment about the great big mess.

"I commend Julia for seeing how young and silly we were, even at the last minute, even as painful and as difficult as it was," he says to me one day, obligatorily. "Thank God she saw it."

"Have you forgiven Jason Patric?"

"It's not a matter of that. We were friends, and I'm surprised that I never got a call from him saying I've fallen in love with da-da-da. Instead, I found out from a stranger."

"Did your dad offer any advice?"

"I think he just went, 'Oh, son...' "

Since then he's not seen Roberts, nor did he call to congratulate her on the birth of her twins. Reports have suggested that she's miffed about that. But why should she be? What happened happened fifteen years ago. You move on. Kiefer, for his part, says he doubts he'll ever even get close to walking down the aisle again.

* * * *

What happened to his movie career after the Julia flap is still a sort of perplexity. He was great as a Bible-thumping Marine in A Few Good Men (1992), as a KKK nut job in A Time to Kill (1996) and as a serial killer in Freeway (1996). But he was also showing up in a lot of hooey, like The Cowboy Way (1994), not to mention a lot of utter crap, done just for the money, the names of which he is loath to reveal (Renegades? Chicago Joe and the Showgirl?). Confused and revolted by his own venality, he retreated to a cattle ranch he bought in California's Santa Ynez Valley. Oddly enough, he took up steer roping and, with his partner, a professional roper by the name of John English, developed his skills to the point where he could travel the rodeo circuit and win a number of competitions (and break all of his fingers). Then, in 2000, he got a call from his friend Stephen Hopkins, a British director working on the pilot for a narratively experimental real-time TV show called 24. Was he interested in the lead? Kiefer didn't see how he could lose. If the pilot sucked, no one would see it. If it didn't, well, maybe he'd have a job to do for a year or two.

"But it was also one of those things," he says. "When 24 became a hit, people started saying things like, 'Comeback this,' and, 'Resurrected-from-the-dead that.' At first I was like, 'Resurrected from the fucking dead? What the fuck does that mean?' But sometimes the brain doesn't let you realize the kind of trouble you're in."

Now he's got a lot more going on than just the show. There's his new movie, The Sentinel, opposite Michael Douglas, in which he plays a Secret Service agent caught up in a plot to assassinate the president. Plus, he's started a record label, Ironworks Music, with his friend Jude Cole, which just released a record by its first signed band, Rocco DeLuca and the Burden. And then, of course, there's the trouble that follows whenever he attempts to blow off steam and find equilibrium in a bottle of scotch.