Actor Kiefer Sutherland has another career: he's in Dublin next week to play 'quasi-roadie' to a band on his own record label. With the clock ticking, he talks to Davin O'Dwyer
Being the public face of counter-terrorism is a tricky task, but it's one that Kiefer Sutherland has taken to quite nicely, thank you very much. Thanks to his ongoing role as Jack Bauer in the massively successful TV series 24, saving the US in a mere day is becoming second nature to Sutherland, and as long as he's able to run his record label and make a few other movies in between times, he's happy to continue foiling terrorist plots.
Sutherland comes to Dublin next week in his role as a music impresario. Ironworks, the label he owns with his friend Jude Cole, a singer-songwriter, is promoting the first album by Rocco DeLuca and the Burden, and Sutherland is throwing himself behind the group.
"I'm travelling with the band. I carry their luggage, and I get to be a quasi-roadie," he says of his new role. "My job is taking care of tickets, getting the band on the plane - and if you knew the band, you'd know that's not the easiest. I think there'll be a few disasters along the way. We're making a documentary about this tour we're doing; what it's like to break a band in this way, just going out and playing dates and trying to create an awareness."
How, though, did Sutherland get into the music business? "The music industry had become very polarised. If you weren't either a hip-hop act or a very pop act, you fell into this kind of abyss: you weren't getting signed, you weren't getting played on the radio. We felt really strongly that if we stayed really small, we could help out."
He says audiences in Ireland have long been receptive to alternative music. "We're very excited about playing in Dublin, because there has always been a fantastic music scene in Ireland. I remember the first time I was in Dublin, just walking up and down Grafton Street and watching 16- and 17-year-old kids playing better than anything I had seen to that point."
Running a music label is probably not the first thing people would expect the 39-year-old Sutherland to be doing, but over his long, roller-coaster career, he has made a habit of surprising people. It seems a long time since the Brat Pack movies Young Guns and The Lost Boys made him one of the most talked-about actors in Hollywood. But the vagaries of the Hollywood machine meant glory days soon gave way to some lean years, with smaller, character-actor parts coming his way rather than leading roles. The series of 24 saved his career, putting him back centre stage.
"When I started out, if you did television you would never do another movie," he says. "There was a very strong and very clear divide between television and film, and that divide has come down in a huge way. I started to feel that a lot of the things I was doing in the feature world were in many cases not being done as well as, for instance, a single episode of ER or The West Wing. Obviously, at some point you're going to have to take a look at that and make a decision. And I was incredibly fortunate that 24 was the decision."
When popular culture has been reluctant to openly discuss the post-9/11 situation in the US, preferring to leave it to the news channels, 24 has been tackling the thorny issues. "One of the amazing things about 24," Sutherland says, "is that we shot half that first season before the terrible events of 9/11, and a pilot almost a year before. In all of our hearts, we want to go back to the day when this story is absolute fantasy, and not paralleling a real fear."
In the current climate of CIA renditions, however, 24 offers a dramatisation of exactly the kind of hypothetical situation so often presented as an excuse for torture: You have 24 hours to find the nuclear bomb; how far would you go? How does Sutherland feel about 24's cameo in the torture debate? "The reality is that if you torture someone, eventually they will tell you what you want to hear, and it becomes incredibly ineffective. In our show, that's not the case: it's a television show. For dramatic purposes, we're going to get caught doing some things that are not justified in the real world."
Jack Bauer has put Sutherland in a position to do the work he wants to, for both his music label and his acting career. "I'm the luckiest person I know right now. To be able to get a second and a third chance in areas of your life is unbelievable. To have not learned from your past would be just incredibly negligent."