Fortunate Son: Kiefer Sutherland recently shared photos of him and his father on the set of their film ‘Forsaken.’ Donald once told Zoomer that working with Kiefer was “like butter melting. Like ballroom dancing. Like goodnight kisses. That easy. That smooth.” All Saints jacket, shirt and Persol sunglasses, all Sutherland’s own. Photo: Bryan Adams
Kiefer Sutherland is on the phone from his home in upstate New York. The voice is unmistakable. With the warmth of aged whisky and an edge of smoke, it has the soft-spoken authority of someone who means business – as an American president, a terrorist sniper or a federal agent with a licence to kill. It’s the voice of a Canadian actor who came of age in bars and pool halls, scaled the backcountry of the American Dream, weathered two divorces, a stint in jail and emerged from the shadow of a famous father to conquer Hollywood, while becoming a serious rodeo cowboy and singer-songwriter along the way.
It’s a voice that sounds like no one else – with the exception of that father, Donald Sutherland, who died in June. As a young man, says Kiefer, “something that I was told by my mother in frustration, and almost all the people that I would run into was: ‘Oh my God, you sound like your dad!’” Kiefer recalls that he once pranked his father after learning how much money he made doing voiceovers for Volvo commercials. “I told him I’d called up Volvo and said, ‘I can do a really good Donald Sutherland, and I’ll do it for half.’ He didn’t think it was as funny as I did.” But Kiefer is forever grateful for the genetic gift. “The truth of it is, my father has one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard in film.”
Later, in announcing Donald’s death, at 88, on Instagram, Kiefer – the eldest of his five children, along with twin sister Rachel – hailed him as “one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved.”
Now Kiefer, 57, is cementing his own legacy as he reinvents himself in the third act of an epic life. His career has cut an incendiary arc over four decades. Flashing a switchblade and a sneer, he hit the scene like a punk angel in freefall with his Hollywood debut in Stand By Me (1986) – as Ace, a thug who bullies children, and guns his convertible down a two-lane blacktop, beer in hand, head-on into the path of a logging truck until it flies splintering off the road.
Sutherland’s dangerous charisma turned out to be a mixed blessing. “When I played Ace right out of the gate,” he says, “I sealed my fate to playing darker characters.”
But not forever. After a decade of saving the world as Jack Bauer in TV’s 24, Sutherland has found an equilibrium. With nothing to prove and the power to say no, he can tack between choice roles in TV and film, while pursuing new challenges off-screen. He takes pleasure in the art of the skill, whether it’s recording a song or deboning a fish. A Renaissance dude and a grandpa, he rolls from farm to table, at home on the range in his country kitchen. But he’s not slowing down. Now recording his fourth album, Sutherland’s spending most of the summer touring Europe with his band on a rigorous schedule of one-nighters. And with four DUIs in his rear-view mirror, he has redeemed his love of whisky by creating Red Bank, a signature Canadian brand distilled on the shores of Nova Scotia.
“Kiefer’s not good with downtime,” says one of his Red Bank partners and friend Gary Briggs, who’s known him for more than 30 years. “He’s got to stay busy. He’s almost like a shark that way. He’s gotta keep it moving no matter what it is. If he’s got six months off and he’s not touring, he’s going to dedicate it to his new farm, he’s going to build barns, he’s going to build a little studio.” Briggs, 68, once handled Neil Young as a Warner Music executive and rode shotgun with Sutherland at the height of his hard partying days in the 1990s: “We were reckless and stupid. We felt we were bulletproof.” Now, having helped his friend navigate a foray into music, he says, “Kiefer wants it to be a profession, another leg of his career.” Adds Briggs, speaking from his home on Mexico’s Baja coast: “He has this work ethic that blows my mind.”
When Briggs and his fly-fishing buddy Rob Steele, an entrepreneur from Red Bank, N.S., first pitched Sutherland about creating a liquor brand, they proposed tequila. Sutherland says he told them, “I don’t drink tequila and I’m not Mexican, but if you ever want to do a uniquely Canadian whisky, I have opinions about that.” With Red Bank, he threw himself into devising a blend that broke the mould, “with a very low-rye profile and a very high-wheat profile to take it back toward Scotland.” His commitment to the craft dispelled concerns about the optics of a former DUI offender promoting alcohol. After all, Briggs jokes, “It’s like asking Dracula to be a rep for the blood bank, right?”
Sutherland doesn’t hesitate to talk about his past transgressions, including his final drunk-driving charge in 2007, for which he served 48 days in L.A.’s Glendale City Jail. “The reason I went to jail,” he says, “is that they had offered rehab, and that was going to be disingenuous because I didn’t plan on never having a drink again.” But serving time was more than sobering. “It’s humiliating. No one wants to be so stupid as to do some of the things that I have done. I’ve made some very poor choices, and embarrassed my family and the people I was closest to.” Briggs backs him up. “He could have bought his way out of that. But he knew he had to face his demons and pay the price. He got no special treatment. He was a custodian. He emptied trash cans and ate baloney sandwiches.”
That watershed moment broke a sense of invincibility born from sudden stardom. Riding to fame with a Brat Pack posse of Lost Boys and Young Guns in the late ’80s, he burned through some 40 films before the age of 30. Thwarted by diminishing roles, failed romances and the hellfire of tabloid scrutiny, he hit a wall. Hollywood was too much for him and he was too much for Hollywood. One of the most convincing and versatile actors of his generation, Sutherland had no identifiable style, aside from keeping it real. In the tradition of James Dean and Gene Hackman, he was an actor for whom acting was not an act – literally when he split the scene in the mid-’90s to play a real cowboy, herding cattle in Montana. Then in 2001, fate flipped a switch, and 24 called. It took the small screen to make him a larger-than-life leading man. Jack Bauer was ruthless, leaving a body count of more than 300 kills over 24’s nine seasons. But for once, Sutherland was the good guy.
The series was a massive success. And after the travelling circus of film sets, it was the day job of his dreams. “I absolutely adored 24,” he says. “My daughter was in school. My other daughter had just come back from college. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to worry about finding something new to do every three months. It’s terrible trying to juggle between commerce and creative. Those two things rarely coexist. Then all of a sudden, you get to do something that people are enjoying, that you find creatively stimulating, and you get to do it for a decade.”
Since 24, Sutherland has found TV and film roles that give him room to stretch, shape-shifting his persona in conspiracy thrillers of a different colour. In Rabbit Hole, a spy series with a rom-com touch, he shows a nimble sense of comic timing as John Weir, a corporate espionage agent up against a mysterious cabal. If Bauer was a blunt instrument on a mission, Weir is a bewildered fugitive tap-dancing through a maze of disinformation. And in Designated Survivor, Sutherland is the antithesis of Bauer as Tom Kirkman, a mild-mannered academic who’s catapulted from a low-level cabinet post into the Oval Office when the U.S. president and the line of succession – the vice-president and speaker of the house – and virtually the entire congress is wiped out by a terrorist bombing of the Capitol during the State of the Union address. (The premise is based on a real-life rule requiring a “designated survivor” to be absent from the event.)
In this apocalyptic West Wing, Sutherland’s fish-out-of-water POTUS governs with such earnest empathy and liberal charm it’s as if a Canadian peacekeeper has been parachuted into the White House. “Jack Bauer is clearly not who I am,” says the actor. “Tom Kirkman is very much the person I would aspire to be.” The show’s creator, David Guggenheim, says, “It was amazing seeing the juxtaposition of those roles, the 180 from an action hero to this kind of Jimmy Stewart everyman.” On the line from New York, he adds that Sutherland “came to the table with a really strong point of view about his character. One of his big notes was to make Kirkman an independent, which was a great way to allow us to tell stories from both sides of the aisle.”
Veteran Toronto filmmaker Sudz Sutherland (no relation) directed two episodes of Designated Survivor and was astonished by how firmly Sutherland set the tone. “Honestly, he’s the most prepared actor I’ve ever worked with,” he tells me. “When he’s on the set, everyone else kind of snaps to. He knows everyone’s lines, and internalizes the script like every scene is its own song.” With a musician’s ear, he’s also acutely sensitive to any noise on the set, even during the blocking of scenes. “We were in this warehouse,” Sudz recalls, “and he’s like, ‘Hold on, there’s a rat on a pipe somewhere in this building.’ We had to find it. And we found there was a rat on a pipe. He demands quiet and we all really appreciate it.”
The intimacy of television plays to Sutherland’s skills as a theatrically trained actor. He delivers some of his most compelling dialogue under his breath, in a hushed register that pulls you into its confidence like a stage whisper. But lately, he has returned to the big screen, seizing bucket-list opportunities to star in the final films from two old masters, Clint Eastwood and William Friedkin – both courtroom dramas driven by dialogue, not action. When he heard that Eastwood, now 94, had declared that Juror No. 2 would be his last picture, Sutherland wrote him a letter. (He doesn’t use email and didn’t own a computer until recently, when he had to buy one for recording music.) Telling Eastwood “how much I appreciated his work as a writer and director,” Sutherland said he would do anything, even work as an extra, on the film (which is awaiting release). Eastwood found a supporting role for him, as a lawyer advising a jury member faced with a moral dilemma during a murder trial.
Sutherland had a memorable part in another courtroom drama, as a stone-cold marine facing off against Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men (1992) – and remembers being awestruck as he watched Jack Nicholson’s famous “You can’t handle the truth” scene. That may have been on Friedkin’s mind when the director of The Exorcist and The French Connection cast Sutherland as another commander who can’t handle the truth in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, released last year after the director’s death at age 87. As the deranged Captain Queeg (originally played by Humphrey Bogart in 1954’s The Caine Mutiny), Sutherland delivers a tour de force in a 21-minute stretch of testimony, filmed in a single take. As Queeg unravels under fire, he is “confronted with the person he really is versus who he pretends to be,” says Sutherland. “At the same time he’s being pushed out of the navy and becoming irrelevant in the moment. And the humiliation of that, for me, is heartbreaking.”
From Queeg’s delusions to the deep-state conspiracies of 24 and Rabbit Hole, Sutherland’s alter egos seem to thrive on paranoid intrigue. But when I ask if he’s prone to that line of thinking, he laughs. “I’ve seen enough stuff on the street in the course of my life that it’s led me to believe everything is pretty much what you see it to be. And I’ve seen enough about how politics work and governments govern – from my grandfather for instance.”
That would be Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas, father of medicare and of Sutherland’s mother, activist-actress Shirley Douglas, who died in 2020. Though Kiefer is routinely name-checked as Donald’s son, his father was absent for much of his life. He was raised in Toronto by his mother, while Tommy Douglas became a beloved father figure. “I spent a lot of time with my grandfather,” he says, “and I idolized him as a man. I idolized him in his concept of politics and human responsibility. I have not met a better person in my life.” As a young teen, Kiefer would spend summers with his grandpa at a family cottage outside Ottawa, and has fond memories of Douglas teaching him how to drive, “rather illegally, in an abandoned parking lot.”
The remarkable thing about Sutherland’s career path as a distinctly Canadian actor who grew up around the Toronto theatre scene, is that it would not have happened without a surreal twist of fate – an armed siege that played out like a scene from 24. Kiefer and Rachel were born in London, England, in 1966, then moved to Los Angeles with their parents two years later. In 1969, they were jolted awake by a pre-dawn raid as a platoon of FBI agents stormed their Beverly Hills home with guns drawn – one levelled at Shirley’s head. They accused her of arranging to purchase hand grenades for the Black Panther Party. (Donald was away in Croatia shooting the war comedy Kelly’s Heroes, in which he played a hippie tank commander opposite Eastwood.) Shirley was politically outspoken. But her husband’s high profile as an anti-Vietnam War activist who was involved politically, and later romantically, with actress Jane Fonda – they met at a Black Panther benefit – may have helped provoke the raid.
Shirley was eventually exonerated, after a jail term and years of legal wrangling that ended with her being denied a work permit and sent back to Canada in 1977. By then, she and Donald were divorced, and she found herself restarting her life as a single mother in Toronto raising 10-year-old twins. “Toronto has always had an outstanding theatre community, and we were welcomed in a remarkable way,” says Kiefer, who keeps a home in his former city and shot Designated Survivor and Rabbit Hole there. “It was a real second chance, and she came back into bloom. I will be grateful to Toronto and the people that helped us through that time till my last breath.”
From doing his homework backstage to seeing his mother electrify a National Arts Centre audience as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sutherland got the acting bug. But it was his musical talent that led to his stage debut, at 11, back in Los Angeles – where director Donald Freed, an activist pal of his mother’s, cast him as a violin-playing child in the Warsaw ghetto drama Throne of Straw. “I had to give up a season of hockey to do the play,” Sutherland recalls, “which in my eyes at the time was a real commitment. But it was the first time anybody told me I was good at something outside of sports. I enjoyed the experience so much. It felt like joining a band or a gang. Before that, I was just going to lay phone cable in northern Ontario.”
A rebellious student, Sutherland burned through half a dozen Ontario schools. At 15, he vanished from a boarding school near Ottawa and hopped a night train to Toronto. Dropping out for good in Grade 10, he rented a one-room basement apartment and cut his teeth as a stage actor. At 16, he landed a lead role in the movie The Bay Boy, which he filmed in Nova Scotia opposite screen legend Liv Ullman, earning a Canadian Genie Award nomination for best actor. Then, after moving to New York and struggling to find work, he bought a vintage Mustang with the proceeds from a modelling job and drove to L.A., where he lived out of his car between auditions. Steven Spielberg handed him his first Hollywood break with a starring role opposite Kevin Costner in a TV episode of Amazing Stories, which led Rob Reiner to cast him in Stand By Me. Costner, he recalls, “was really special, kind of an older brother to me, and Mr. Spielberg – he was God to an actor in film.”
All Saints jacket, denim shirt and Edwin jeans, all Sutherland’s own. Photo: Bryan Adams
As a kid trying to make it in Hollywood, Sutherland felt intimidated by the fame of a father he barely knew, and had the strange experience of getting to know him through his films, which he hadn’t seen as a boy because they were restricted. “By the time I was 18,” he says, “with videotapes, I got to see Bertolucci’s 1900, Fellini’s Casanova, Don’t Look Now, The Dirty Dozen, Eye of the Needle, Klute . . . and that kind of success made me feel very small.”
He and Donald met infrequently. “I would see him every other Christmas or summer. It wasn’t because we were estranged, we just didn’t see each other. To make matters worse, every time I moved somewhere, he moved somewhere else. I moved to Los Angeles; he moved to New York. I moved back to New York; he moved to France. Honestly, it was just circumstantial, but it was uncanny.”
Sutherland’s reflections on his father, in interviews conducted just weeks before Donald’s death from a long illness, now have a sad finality. “My dad’s not young,” he told me, “so I think there’ll be a regret that we both share, that we wish we had spent more time together.” But just as Sutherland got to know his dad through all those movies, there will be more to learn in Donald’s memoir, Made Up, But Still True, due out in November. Kiefer later told me neither he nor his siblings have read it, adding that “he was still editing it three days before he passed.”
When Sutherland did spend time with his dad, he says, they never talked about acting. So when they worked together, on the 2015 western Forsaken, he was keen to observe his father’s process. “We’re doing the scene,” he recalls, “and half of me is intently watching him, studying what he’s doing. Then the dialogue starts and I’m like, ‘Oh f–k, I was supposed to say something, right?’ I was caught out.” That was Kiefer’s last western, a genre he fell in love with while filming Young Guns. “It was so much fun,” he says. “They gave you a horse and six-shooter and said, ‘Go pretend to be a cowboy.’ We had wranglers, real cowboys, and their lifestyle was very cool.” Sutherland eagerly adopted it; he joined the rodeo circuit as a roper and won a national championship. “I’ve broken a bunch of fingers in my right hand,” he says. “I’m lucky to have kept them all because a lot of cowboys will lose their thumb if they get it caught between the saddle horn and rope.” He also got banged up doing action scenes on 24, fracturing a kneecap, wrist and foot at various points. “But for the most part,” he says, “I heal up pretty well.”
Life in Hollywood’s fast lane has also left some scars. Briggs first met Sutherland at a dinner party at his home in L.A., where the actor was living with fiancée Julia Roberts, his co-star in Flatliners (1990). “They were the ‘It Couple’ at the time,” Briggs says. “They owned the town.” But in 1991, they ended their engagement just days before the elaborate wedding was set to take place on a studio soundstage. And Roberts flew off to Ireland with Sutherland’s best friend, actor Jason Patric.
The public drama of that breakup was the epicentre of an eventful love life. By the age of 21, Kiefer was a husband with an 11-year-old stepdaughter and a new baby (now actress Sarah Sutherland, who played the daughter of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on Veep). Three years later, he and his first wife, Camelia Kath, were divorced. After the Roberts romance, Sutherland had a second short-lived marriage to Toronto model Kelly Winn. Now he lives with model and actress Cindy Vela. They remain unmarried “not for any specific reason,” he says, “other than if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Their house, in a remote corner of upstate New York, is surrounded by 30 hectares (78 acres), where Sutherland has found a passion for regenerative farming. “Eventually we’ll have some livestock,” he says, “but not to harvest. I just need their shit for the fields.”
It adds up to a life worthy of a country song or two. But Sutherland’s music has a streak of raw confession that resists cliché. “He’s more of an outlaw country guy,” says Briggs, citing the influence of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, “the guys on the other side of Nashville, the anti-Nashville scene.” And Sutherland is “unlike most other actor-musicians,” adds Briggs, who worked with Jeff Bridges on Crazy Heart (2009). “With Jeff, it was about getting up there, doing cover songs and just having fun. Kiefer takes his craft very seriously. His singing and songwriting just trampoline him to another place.” That singing voice, which modulates between a confidential rasp and full-throated power, has the same blend of velvet and grit that he brings to his performance as an actor. Music, however, allows him to express himself more directly than scripted characters, he says. “I’ve written a bunch of songs that don’t necessarily paint myself in the best light, but there’s something very comforting about sharing those experiences.” A case in point is 2020’s County Jail Gate:
“As the buzzer rings, you’re going to feel the sting / As they open the county jail gate
Once you’re inside, there’s no place to hide / And you’re left to your wits and your fate”
Sutherland has a thing for the authenticity of the moment. “I have a rule that if I start writing a song, I’m going to finish it – even if I hate where it’s going,” he says, citing a recent example. “It starts out with ‘When you have more days behind you than you have left to live.’ I love that first line but haven’t been able to fill in the verses.”
As you get older, he muses, “you’re aware that you’re less relevant. But after working with William Friedkin and Clint Eastwood, you realize that as long as you have an ability to tell a story, and have gone through this many years of learning, you actually are relevant. I know that I’m mathematically on the downslope. And I’m all right with that. The hard part is over.”
Creative Director/Producer, Tanya Watt; Fashion stylist, Joanne Blades / Art Department; Grooming, Sylvia Viau-Kistler / Cloutier Remix; Prop stylist, Tamasin Reid / Art Department; Photography assistants, David
Jakle, Travis Feral. Photographed on location at Smashbox Studios, Culver City, L.A.
A version of this article appeared in the August/September 2024 issue with the headline ‘Lostboy Found’, p. 38.
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