Kiefer Sutherland: Heart of Darkness

The trouble has always been around, in one form or another. Well in the past, there have been arrests for driving under the influence and humorous episodes with others arrested for the same thing, like the one with actor Gary Oldman in 1991. Starting to laugh, Kiefer says, "They were handcuffing him and he was on his knees, right level with the window of the car where I was. He had his head down and he looked up and he said, 'Right. Maybe next time we just have lunch.' That was the coolest kind of Cool Hand Luke line. I just loved hanging out with him. But that was a long time ago."

He's also been in a number of bar fights, including the one where some guy insulted his wife ("he licked her foot") and he got a little carried away. "I just kept hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting. 'Don't fucking stop, because you don't want this guy to get up.' I felt awful after that. I remember thinking that life is too short to behave like this."

But for the most part, Kiefer is known as a do-anything-for-a-laugh kind of fun inebriate. One time he launched himself into the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fully clothed, to get some yuks. Another time, according to tabloid reports, he downed eight shots of J&B Scotch at a bar, stripped off his shirt and gyrated topless before lap-dancing on a guy's knee. But perhaps the most emblematic episode occurred last Christmas, inside London's Strand Palace Hotel.

"After a marathon booze bender with pals," wrote The Sunday Mirror, "a huge Christmas tree caught [Kiefer's] eye. 'I hate that fucking Christmas tree,' he declared. 'The tree has to come down.' Kiefer warned staff: 'I'm smashing it -- can I pay for it?' A staff member replied, 'I'm absolutely sure you can, sir.' [He] then hurled himself into the Norwegian spruce, sending baubles and lights crashing to the ground.... Pulling pine needles out of his hair and T-shirt, he said to a hotel employee, 'Oh, sorry about that...you're so cool. This fucking hotel rocks!' "

Kiefer says this account is fairly accurate and disputes only his quotes. "I didn't say anything," he says, "and that's what was funny. It was a joke, done to make someone laugh. And the tree was fine. It was fine."

"Is drinking your most self-destructive behavior?" I ask him, knowing the answer.

"It's absolutely caused me the most grief."

"Because of what you do when you get drunk or because you have a drinking problem?"

He considers this for only a second. "I'd have to say a bit of both. And because I'm a public person, I've embarrassed my mother and my family and, most specifically, my daughter. It's been the biggest problem for me. I have a few drinks and I'm not so worried about tomorrow and not thinking about yesterday. I am in this moment and I don't give a shit about anything else, and that's that. It's right out of the textbook on problem drinkers. And I'm not stupid. I know it's my fault, usually in an effort to make someone laugh. And then the next day, I go, 'Oh, God, don't let me do that again.' So why do I do it again? And again? And again?"

He lets the question hang there. He seems truly exasperated. I suggest that maybe it's the adult equivalent of what he did as a kid who had to make a new set of friends every year and did it by making them laugh.

"Yeah," he says levelly. "But you might want to move past that at a point, don't you think? You want to move forward."

* * * *

And that's another thing that's great about Kiefer: He doesn't try to hide or adjust for public consumption his various little complexities, peculiarities, embarrassments and contradictions. He says things like, "The last movie I cried at? Oh, fuck. Oh, I'll be honest with you. Oh, fuck, I don't know if I can. Oh, well. I think it was Love, Actually. Yeah. I'm no different than anybody else." He has those "texture issues" with food and says, "Avocado used to freak me out, I've never liked cheese, and runny eggs make me want to ralph." He says that sometimes he calls his father "Dad," but mostly he calls him, "Hey," as in, "Hey, what're you doing?"

He likes to tell this story about his father: "At one point before the divorce, we didn't have any money, and his one pair of pants had a hole in them, but my mother's a tough lady, and he was nervous about asking her to sew them up. So where the rip was, he just painted his ass black to match the pants. That's his sense of humor." Then he'll tell you that, like his dad before him, he often chooses not to wear underwear himself.

He has never, ever tried to quit smoking.

The first tattoo he ever got, he narrowed his choices down to the Chinese character for strength and Mickey Mouse in a space helmet, before settling on the former. He once heard that some college-going 24 fans had developed a drinking game in which you have to down one shot for every time Jack Bauer says, "Damn it," which is the show's "fuck" and "shit" substitute. So during one episode, in one scene, he took it upon himself to say "Damn it" three times in a row, "Boom, boom, boom. And that was just one scene. By the end, there had to be fourteen 'Damn its.' And I could just see all these college kids going, 'Oh, fuck!' "

He only has two mirrors in his home. "I've always thought that I look different in my head than what I see. I had a real big problem with it when I saw Stand by Me. I thought I'd ruined the movie. I so clearly wanted my character to be a mean, angry version of James Dean. And, obviously, I didn't look anything like that. That's always thrown me off. So I tend not to look in mirrors."

He calls his home the cave and says things like, "Ultimately, I don't want to live in the cave forever."

The night that Kiefer and I hit a few bars -- he favors anti-glamorous ones, narrow and sedate, with mostly locals inside -- he is greeted in each with the same line. "Where you been?" the bartenders want to know. He says something about his tough 24 schedule and orders a J&B neat, with a Coke chaser. For the past five years, he's largely been surrounded by the same people, mostly the 24 cast and crew. They know him so well when he speaks to them it's in the shorthand of old friends, with him rarely having to think any deeper than the first thought that pops into his mind. But with me around, he says he's had to explore himself a little more, and he likes it.

He talks fondly about that first year in L.A., living in a house rented by Sarah Jessica Parker, with fellow struggling actors Billy Zane and Robert Downey Jr. "I've been thinking about how young we were," he says. "Some of us were going to a strip club one night. When we all met downstairs, every one of us was wearing a trench coat, in the middle of the summer, in Los Angeles. This was our idea of what you did when you went to a strip club. We started laughing, but not one person took that fucking jacket off."

He shakes his head, happily.

"I remember the first girl I slept with," he goes on. "She was seventeen, I was thirteen. I remember leaving her house after we'd done it, like, seven times, and I remember skipping to the bus stop, going, 'I've done it seven times.' And I was literally skipping."

He shakes his head again.

Outside the last bar of the evening, the bouncer says to him, "It's a good thing you haven't left yet. These girls gave me orders if you leave before they make out with you, I have to beat you up."

Kiefer raises his hands. "Don't do it!" he says comically.

The girls, a couple of plain Janes named Jennifer and Nicky, stumble out and get Kiefer to pose for pictures with them.

"Thank you," he says afterward. "God bless your hearts."

Everyone looks pleased. One of Kiefer's favorite bits of dialogue comes from the movie Flatliners. On the way to the subway, he says it. He says, "In the end we all know what we've done." And then, maybe for good measure, he says it once more.

(From RS 998, April 20, 2006)

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