Alone In The Dark With Kiefer Sutherland
At the moment, Kiefer Sutherland is quite looking forward to the day when the creators of the unnerving Fox TV show 24 do unto his Jack Bauer character what they’ve done to so many others: kill him off, brutally, but with few tears. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I love what I do.” But he’s thirty-nine years old, a little pent-up and a lot tired. All he’s had for the past five years, ten months out of each year, are endless fourteen-hour days of working on the show, gun in hand, eyes squinted, voice on ultra-incredibly intense, saving the world with methods that might not be right but are never wrong. He has no girlfriend in his life, no affection or release of that sort. Sometimes he feels trapped, caged, really. And then, as a consequence, he occasionally falls into the scotch bottle and ends up making a messy spectacle of himself.
“There’s a point that I get to where I just go, ‘Fuck it,”‘ he says one day in Los Angeles, where he lives in the somewhat seedy Silver Lake district, in the vast, open expanse of a former iron foundry. “It’s selfish and self-absorbed and it’s a dangerous thing, thinking that if you work really hard, you should be able to reward yourself by going out and getting shit-faced. I should be able to wake up in the morning without going, ‘Oh, no! Where’s my boot?’ Or ‘Where am I?’ Or ‘One of your friends didn’t happen to bring my car home, did they?’ It’s not a very clever way to live, and I don’t want to live like that. But it’s the kind of trade you have to make.”
I’d once read that, in public, Kiefer renders “a kind of bluff, surface friendliness that seems to conceal something else.” This has also been the gloss on his father, that towering figure of an actor, the great Donald Sutherland, who once helped define eras, with movies like M*A*S*H and Klute. Certainly the two look alike, with their weird, low-slung earlobes, their chipmunk cheeks and their mischievous devil’s-work grins. But as far as the son goes, I find him surprisingly forthright, gamely willing to talk about anything you want to talk about – his two failed marriages, his luckless 1991 engagement to Julia Roberts, his disapproval of foods with certain textures, and assorted other upsets, including drunken run-ins with Christmas trees, his (former) tendency to get into bar fights and that time in his life, just before 24, when he was churning out very bad flicks just for the money.
Right now, though, he’s guiding me through his beloved collection of vintage guitars (a ’59 Les Paul, a ’67 Telecaster, a ’68 ES335 and about fifty-five more) and saying guitar-nerd things like “See, this one’s got a Jimmy Page switcher, so I could have a double-coil pick-up here and a single coil here and reroute it all the way through. Just amazing tonal quality!” And then, a few moments later, after easing silkily through some Hendrix on one of his acoustics, he says, “Want to go out? I’ll take you on the subway. That’s how I get around. We can have a drink that way, because I can’t do the driving and the other.” “You can’t?” I say. “Noooo,” he says. “That would be bad.”