Kiefer Sutherland in 2002

He’s not the archetypal Canadian actor; but he may well be the archetypal Canadian actor in Hollywood: More competent than many of the performers who surround him, he remains something of an outsider. For reasons obscure to everyone but perhaps himself, real stardom steadfastly refuses to attach itself to Kiefer Sutherland.

By the early 90’s, his brat-pack days over, Sutherland seemed to be inching towards a consistent film persona. Among the Charlie Sheens and Chris O’Donnells crashing in anachronistic flames about him, he alone looked comfortable with a saber in his hand and a horse between his legs in The Three Musketeers. In the otherwise forgettable The Cowboy Way he carved out a respectable portrait of a modern Western Man; a dignified, denim presence next to whom co-star Woody Harrelson seemed a refugee from Hee Haw.

You got the sense that if he had been born 40 years earlier Sutherland might have had a good career as a western star. His most effective character type is reminiscent of a Joel McCrea or a diminutive Gary Cooper---the reluctant, laconic, self-effacing man of action. Taking on that kind of cinematic persona cannot be a calculated act in contemporary Hollywood---in a place where actors prefer to be seen as gods, nobody writes leading characters like that any more. No, he does it because it’s genuine.

Hollywood has thus not been kind to him recently. The quiet, self-effacing leading man has been cast as: a drooling child-killer in Eye For an Eye; a racist cracker and clansman in A Time to Kill; a demented Peter Lorre imitator in Dark City; a snarling, corrupt lawman in Picking up the Pieces; a psychotic child psychiatrist in Freeway; a porn director in The Last Days of Frankie the Fly…. For a long time now there’s been a sense of him punching the clock and producing a body of work designed for the compulsive video renter but not many others.

From there it doesn’t seem a major career jump to a television series, but 24 will likely prove to be the best thing that’s happened to him in years. The show is slick, professional and compulsively presented, but most important, Sutherland plays a character that suits him. His Jack Bauer in 24 is professional and understated; a man in a world of duplicity and espionage struggling to reconcile his job with his desire to be a competent family man.

The sense you get looking at Kiefer Sutherland as he makes his actor’s way through the world feels awfully similar. When script and role allow, he too is very good at the charade that is his profession. But most of all, he simply seems to be someone trying to lead a normal life. As both actor and man he seems to echo Joel McCrea’s words in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country: “I just want to be able to enter my house justified.”

-Published in Flare, 2002