Kiefer Sutherland: Clint Eastwood is the director Hollywood needs

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Kiefer Sutherland glugs me out a whisky as we settle into a vast sofa that threatens to envelop us both, leaving us somewhere between sitting and reclining. We’re in the London headquarters of the Gibson guitar company in a private room accessed through a hidden panel in the back of a red phone box. All four walls are lined with rows of shining guitars. 

I could hear Sutherland before I could see him; between interviews he “decompresses” by jamming on his own Gibson, playing songs he wrote for his self-titled band. The star – who was born in Britain, raised in Canada and lives in Los Angeles – is ostensibly here to talk about his newest venture, Red Bank Whisky, but the conversation veers between topics as diverse as the fears that come with getting older (he’s 57 now), the conflict in Gaza, the time his childhood home was raided by armed FBI agents and the perilous state of Hollywood.

From the corner of my eye I can see his press lady shift uncomfortably in her seat as the conversation enters controversial territory but Sutherland answers every question in the same laconic, gravelly drawl. You would expect nothing less from the enfant terrible of 1980s and 90s Hollywood, star of cult classics Lost Boys, Flatliners and Stand By Me (on the set of which he taught River Phoenix to play guitar), former fiance to Julia Roberts (a relationship that hit the rocks amid rumours of infidelity, denied by Sutherland), and who ended up in the slammer not once, not twice but three times, most recently for a DUI in 2007 (after his release he had three birds tattooed on his arm as a reminder not to do it again).

The FBI claimed my mother was distributing hand grenades to the Black Panthers. That was disproven, of course, but it took a while

Kiefer Sutherland

Dressed in skinny black jeans, black boots and a black zip-up jacket, he looks every inch the rock star, the deep lines on his face hinting at a life well lived.

I ask if he’ll join me in a whisky but he demures: “I never drink when I’m working, whether it’s film or theatre or even music. I’ll raise a glass as a way of saying thank you to the audience but I’m very focused – that’s been my rule from the very beginning.”

I glance down guiltily at my already half-empty glass and he breaks into a Cheshire cat grin.

“Ah, you’ve got miles to run, son. As you get older it’s just not as easy. You don’t bounce back as quick. You don’t bounce back from working out. You don’t bounce back from going out. You just don’t bounce.”

It’s fair to say Sutherland has done his share of bouncing. You only need to google “Kiefer Sutherland drunk” to discover a trove of spicy material. He got into bar fights. He famously body-slammed a Christmas tree in the lobby of a fancy London hotel while he was working as the tour manager for the band Rocco DeLuca & the Burden (a moment captured in all its terrible glory in the rockumentary I Trust You to Kill Me). So what does a good night out look like today? 

“At this age? Safety. Everybody gets home safe.”

•••

Over the last four decades, Sutherland has been a near-constant presence on screen and stage. By the end of the 1980s he was already one of the biggest stars in the world and, following a relatively dry spell in his thirties, he became the biggest name on television with the release of 24. He’s fairly brutal in his assessment of the industry today, however. The problem, he says, is that the people running studios when he broke through in the 1980s were filmmakers – today they’re grey suits with a ‘masters’ in business. 

“Warner Brothers is owned by General Electric, they make jet engines. Sony is owned by Sony, they make radios and televisions. And people wonder why, a business that, over 120 years, has been only financially positive – the only financially successful export out of the United States – is suddenly going south. 

Kiefer Sutherland playing songs from his Kiefer Sutherland Band after launching Red Bank Whisky

“We’ve lost track of the people who know how to make a movie. There’s this algorithm they’ve come up with, where we’ll either make a billion dollars or lose $500m, and use that as a tax write-off. Instead of making a $200m movie we should make ten $20m movies like we used to. Stand By Me was an $8m movie. Lost Boys was $14m and that was an expensive one.”

He hasn’t given up, though. Sutherland recently wrapped his latest movie, Juror No. 2, directed by Clint Eastwood. He says he’s always wanted to be in an Eastwood film and, on hearing this would be the director’s last outing, wrote him a handwritten letter asking for a part. Was it everything he had hoped and dreamed?

“Eastwood was amazing. He’s softly spoken but he knows exactly what he wants. And more importantly, he knows exactly when he’s got it. He’s got a great calm and confidence: I cannot tell you how rewarding that is for an actor.”

•••

You could be forgiven for dismissing yet another actor-turned-musician outfit as a vanity project, someone with money and fame cosplaying in another industry. But Sutherland is good. His albums are a highly polished, blues-inflected take on country rock, full of wistful tales about rolling with life’s punches. He could be taking it easy right now, cherry picking film roles and living a perfectly manicured life in the Hollywood Hills. Instead he’s constantly on the road, bouncing between film and music gigs, not to mention launching a whisky brand. 

He says he can’t remember the last time he spent more than three weeks in the same city. “I’ve made that choice. I don’t have to tour – I could go to Hawaii and lay on a beach. But that’s not where I’m at. I did that a couple times in the past and I really enjoyed it but I would much rather be with my friends going to play some shows. 

‘I could go to Hawaii and lay on a beach. But that’s not where I’m at. I would much rather be with my friends going to play some shows.’

Kiefer Sutherland

“There’s a real adrenaline hit that you get before you go on stage, the hopes and expectations of trying to do something well, and the fear of thinking you might not. For me it’s a product of wanting to be the best you can possibly be at any given moment. There’s always gonna be moments when that doesn’t happen, so it’s like playing Russian roulette. My first gig didn’t go well and it pissed me off so much that I planned another for three days later. That’s something I discovered about myself: normally if something doesn’t go well the first time, people say, ‘I’m not doing that again’. I had a very different reaction: I was gonna do it again and again until it did go well, then I’d be fucking done with it!

“I’ve done a lot of theatre in my life and I kept thinking ‘that’s going to serve me when I do live performances’. But I was always playing a character. When I play a song it’s something I wrote. It’s personal and I’m trying to tell you why I wrote it and why you should listen to it. You make yourself about as vulnerable as you can possibly be. It’s night and day, really.” 

He breaks into an anecdote about Laurence Olivier after his famous stint in Macbeth (in true thespian style, Sutherland calls it “The Scottish Play”). Olivier received four standing ovations after what was seen as one of the greatest Shakespearian performances of all time. After the show he was found pacing back and forth in his dressing room, clearly distraught. “What’s up, Larry,” asked his manager, “that was sensational.”

Kiefer Sutherland in Lost Boys

“I know,” replied Olivier. “But I can’t work out why.”

For Sutherland this is the essence of the creative process: “You’ve surrendered to such a degree that you’re no longer in control, you’ve crossed the line into something else.”

•••

When Sutherland was four years old, the FBI stormed his house – “they put a gun to my 11-year-old brother’s head” – and arrested his mother for allegedly selling hand grenades to the Black Panther party.

“I don’t know how that story got out but it’s absolutely true,” he says. “My mother was organising a breakfast programme for children who weren’t getting fed before they went to school. She also helped distribute mace in the ghetto because women were being violated so badly. The FBI claimed that she was distributing hand grenades, not mace. And, of course, that was disproven and she was allowed out of prison. But it took a while.”

I suggest a family experience like that might cloud one’s view of the world, change the way you see things like the student protests that are sweeping across America. Sutherland isn’t so sure.

“Look, part of the reason you go to university is to get into a good protest. But this situation is so nuanced and complicated that you have to be a little more pragmatic about what you’re asking for. Ultimately the only way forward is for the younger generation to show unity, in spite of what older people are doing.

“I do think that on some level the world has forgotten that 1,500 Israelis were slaughtered on October 7th, some as young as six months old – it was absolutely brutal. And in no way is that a justification or an excuse to kill 35,000 men, women and children in Gaza, it’s absolutely horrific. We have to take a much bigger look at the fucking leaders making themselves more important than the crises they’re a part of.”

I get scared of the day I can’t sing in the band, of the day I can’t play, of the day I’m too old to be insured to do a film. This isn’t the time to take it easy.

Kiefer Sutherland

Sutherland’s roles have tended to skew towards the political. He played a (reluctant) President in his latest series, Designated Survivor, and he was the President’s brutal right hand man in perhaps his most famous role as Jack Bauer in 24. The latter has come under scrutiny in the years since the show aired, not least for Bauer’s use of what might diplomatically be called ‘extra-judicial force’.

“Jack Bauer wasn’t political,” he corrects me. “He became politicised. He served at the whim of the President. The show itself could get political around the edges but Jack Bauer as a character was simply an instrument. I actually really liked the character and I thought he was very noble. John McCain said it was his favourite show. Barack Obama really liked it and so did Bill Clinton. [Writer and producer] Howard Gordon had a habit of looking at a newspaper and saying, ‘I’m gonna make the worst version of this’. And then it would come true. We shot the first season before 9/11, before the terrible events of Abu Ghraib…”

Kiefer Sutherland in perhaps his most famous role as Jack Bauer in 24.

I met Sutherland the day Rishi Sunak announced the summer election, an hour or so before his infamous speech in the driving rain outside Downing Street. Sutherland comes from a political family, with both his father (the actor Donald Sutherland) and his mother (the actor and activist Shirley Douglas) active in left wing circles. What does he make of politics in the States right now?

“It’s absolutely ludicrous,” he sighs. “How long they’re allowed to campaign for, how long they’re allowed to donate and collect money for. And that there is no regulation. It’s alarming.”

I wonder if he’s tempted to throw his weight behind a candidate in the way so many of his Hollywood peers have?

“I can’t vote in the United States because I’m British, right? So I don’t think it’s completely fair for me to start telling people what they should do if I can’t do it myself. Ironically, I can’t vote in Canada where I grew up, either, because I don’t live there.”

•••

Our interview has overrun and his publicist rises to shoo me out of this strange room, back through the phone box and into the London rain. As I finish the remains of my whisky (which really is very good, smooth and complex and warm and, according to Sutherland, unlikely to leave me with a headache the next morning), I squeeze in a last question. As a man who was, for much of his career, associated with youth culture, how does it feel to be approaching his seventh decade? 

I expect him to blow off the question, to tell me he doesn’t feel a day over 40, but he’s surprisingly introspective. “I get scared of the day I can’t sing in the band, of the day I can’t play. I enjoy it so much. I’m going to do it as much as I can. I worry about the day I’m too old to be insured to do a film. I’m lucky, I’ve been doing this most of my life but this isn’t the time to take it easy. For 40 years I’ve acquired a knowledge and capability to do something and now I’m at the peak of my creative capabilities, because of what I know. I’m speaking about film here. The music is exciting because there’s so much I don’t know. Every moment feels like a learning experience.”

As I leave I can hear Kiefer Sutherland start to strum his guitar again. Decompressing before the next interview. Getting ready to go again.

• Kiefer Sutherland’s Red Bank Whisky is out now priced £47.95; for more information go to the website here