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. He wasn’t an asshole any more.”
