46 The Times Magazineiefer Sutherland is showing me
his tattoos. “They’re a poor man’s
diary,” says the actor best known
for his role as counterterrorist
agent Jack Bauer in the TV series
24. They chart the journey of his
life. The first tattoo he had done
was of a Japanese symbol that
represented strength of heart.
“I was a broody 17-year-old
taking himself way too seriously,” he tells me.
“And next to that is a sword to remind me of a
fight I got into with a friend of mine.” There is
the tattoo of the Douglas clan to remind him
of his actress mother, Shirley Douglas, who
raised him when she divorced his father, the
Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland.
He continues his tattoo journey, pointing
out the Virgin Mary – which he got after
noticing how many of the Latin-American
men in his neighbourhood in east Los Angeles
had stickers of Mary on their cars. “Where
these men came from in life is so cruel,” he
explains. “They’ve been praying to Jesus and
God their whole life, so they started praying to
Mary thinking she might be kinder. I thought
that was really profound and so unique to my
neighbourhood that I got that tattooed.”
Sutherland, 55, has in the past had a well-
deserved reputation for enjoying a drink and
a fight. He has three bird tattoos to represent
the three times he has been in prison – the
most recent was a 48-day sentence in 2007 for
drink driving. “I was never going to put myself
in that position again,” he says. “And these
birds were going to remind me to smarten up.”
Along with the three prison spells, other
lowlights in Sutherland’s roll call of bad
behaviour include a brawl with two off-duty
soldiers in Montana that left him with a piece
of broken glass from a beer bottle embedded
in his elbow; downing eight shots of Scotch
and gyrating topless before lapdancing on a
man’s knee at a strip club; and rugby-tackling
a 9ft Christmas tree to the ground at the
Strand Palace Hotel in London.
It is hard to believe the Sutherland I am
talking to today via Zoom – dressed in a sober
black turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed
spectacles – is the same man who once
launched himself fully clothed into a pool
at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Did you really have 140 stitches in your
head, I ask. “Oh, at least,” he says. “Different
injuries, but yes.”
When I ask him to reflect on his youthful
misadventures he makes no attempt to deny
or underplay them. “I had a great time,” he
says. “I’ll make no bones about it. There are
moments where I embarrassed myself and did
some things I really regret and I wish I hadn’t
put myself in those positions. But the great
stories I have in my life and great times with
my friends were certainly centred around abar, having a drink. I’m not going to pretend
I didn’t do it.”
This is, I am to learn, how Sutherland rolls
these days. In our conversation he is polite
and gracious and unapologetic. “When I look
back at the actors I really admire, there was
Gene Hackman or Peter O’Toole or Richard
Harris,” he says. “These were people who
really lived a life and you could see it in their
face and feel it in their words. I was always
impressed by that, and I think maybe as a
young person I tried to keep up a little more
than I should have.”
Sutherland first found fame as part of
the Eighties Brat Pack alongside Sean Penn,
Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, starring
in a string of hit movies including Stand by
Me, Flatliners, The Lost Boys and Young Guns.
Huge success in the Eighties was followed by
a decade in the wilderness as Sutherland was
bruised by a series of flops. “I wasn’t prepared
for how fast it went away,” he admits.
He quit Hollywood to buy a ranch and
reinvent himself as a championship rodeo rider.
It was the iconic role of Jack Bauer in the
hugely successful 24 – which ran for nine series
from 2001 – that revived Sutherland’s career.
If films defined the first act of Kiefer
Sutherland’s career and television shaped the
second, it is music that dominates the third
act – these days he is playing a new role as
a country singer. His debut album, Down in a
Hole, was released in 2016 followed by Reckless
& Me in 2019. His latest album, Bloor Street, is
released this month.
It would be easy to mock Sutherland for his
musical ambitions but it would also be unfair- he may be an actor but as a singer he is the
real deal, with a world-weary tobacco-stained
voice and songs that recall Merle Haggard,
Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.
“There are always going to be people
who are not going to be a fan of what you’re
doing,” he says. “I’ve also found that if you
stick around and don’t give up, you will find
the people who are enjoying that music.”
Kiefer Sutherland was born in 1966 at St
Mary’s Hospital in Paddington in London,
where his father was working on the TV series
A Farewell to Arms, but the young family,
which included Kiefer’s twin sister, Rachel,
moved to Los Angeles the following year
as Donald’s career flourished. His parents
divorced when Kiefer was three – work
commitments that took his father away from
home was one factor, a three-year affair with
Jane Fonda another – and he moved with
his mother to the Toronto neighbourhood
of Bloor Street.
“I had my first kiss on Bloor Street and
had my first fight on Bloor Street,” he recalls.
“I got beat up for the first time in my life
on Bloor Street.”That sounds like one hell of a night, I say.
“It was many, many nights,” he says. “But
every seminal moment I had as a young boy
to a young man seemed to happen around
Bloor Street.”
He did not see much of his father in his
early years. “I think both of us would say we
wish we spent more time together and that’s
just the truth,” he says. He cherishes the
childhood memories he does have. His dad
driving young Kiefer to school in a Ferrari he
had won in a poker game. When Kiefer was
14 and obsessed with David Bowie, his father
took him to see the singer – with whom he
was friendly – and later led him backstage.
“We knocked on the door,” he recalls. “And
Bowie said, ‘Donald, I am so glad to see you.
Oh, you’ve brought your family?’ I think
I interrupted what was going to be a very fun
night for the two of them out on the town.”
It might have seemed inevitable with both
parents as actors that Kiefer Sutherland would
end up following in the family business, but he
tells me his decision was more based on a lack
of other choices.
“I didn’t have that many options,” he
says. “I was not a great student. I was really
interested in law but I was a terrible student.
There was no way I was getting into law
school. I had done a play when I was about
11 years old and it was the first thing that
people told me I was good at. I was just
old enough to have a crush on a lady in the
play. It ticked a lot of boxes for me. I can’t
underestimate the value of someone telling
you you’re good at something. And so
I naturally gravitated towards that.”
Sutherland dropped out of school at 15 and
his father managed to get him a small part in
Max Dugan Returns, a film in which he was
starring. Did the young man think being
Donald Sutherland’s son had helped his career?
“I’ve certainly seen moments where it has
helped me and I’ve seen moments where it
really has not,” he says. “My father is not a
wallflower. He’s had a colourful life and there
are a few people he might have rubbed the
wrong way down the road. I certainly know
one director – I sat in his waiting room for
six hours and that director would not see me
because he’d had a falling-out with my father.”
After landing his first leading role in a
Canadian drama, The Bay Boy, SutherlandK
Did you really have
140 stitches in your
head? ‘Oh, at least.
Different injuries,
but yes’
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