Playing It Cool, One Very Long Day at a Time

By James Poniewozik

You can take the actor out of the movies, but you can't take the movies out of the actor. So when I ask Kiefer Sutherland how long his TV drama, 24, can keep its edge, he reaches to the pictures for an analogy. "I thought Die Hard worked, and I thought Die Hard 2 worked," he says carefully. "And I think they should have stopped it there."

Sutherland's worries are a reflection of the high bar the show set last year. It chronicled "the longest day" in the life of counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer (Sutherland)--24 hours in which he had to foil the assassination of a presidential candidate while also trying to save his own wife and daughter from kidnappers. The show combined popcorn-movie thrills with a complicated and innovative narrative (each episode was one hour in real time). And it confounded expectations right up to the end, when Bauer, after saving his daughter and the candidate, found his pregnant wife shot to death by a treacherous colleague.

Now Bauer--never the Kumbaya-singing type to begin with--is in a far darker place, which is right where Sutherland, 35, wants him. Over an Atkins-y lunch at New York City's W Union Square Hotel (burger, medium rare; hold the bun), he says, "I wanted him to be very cold. I wanted him to be very hard. I wanted him to be mean."

Bauer is a good guy who carries himself like a bad guy, and Sutherland--known for playing heavies in movies like Stand By Me and The Lost Boys--plays him cold yet fiery, like a quart of vodka from the freezer. But 24 had to reintroduce Sutherland to an audience that remembered him as an '80s teen star who a decade later was better known for having been dumped by Julia Roberts. In the late '90s he even dropped out of acting to compete on the professional rodeo circuit (he had learned roping for 1994's The Cowboy Way). "I took two years off," he says. "The first year was on purpose. The second year was to remind people who the f___ I was."

24 changed that quickly, as Sutherland brought home a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination for his first year's work. The second season (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) will put Bauer through another longest day of his life. How? Last year I wrote that because of post-9/11 sensitivities, "one doubts that the second season might involve...a nuclear bomb in New York City." I'm proud to say I was correct. The second season involves a nuclear bomb threat in Los Angeles. "Once you posit that the show is set in the world of antiterrorism," says executive producer Robert Cochran, "you can't shy away from the things that people are afraid of. It'd be like a cop show with no murders." (Also, 24 has gutsily kept its real-time format, which Fox feared made it inaccessible to viewers who missed episodes.)

The audacious plot pays off in the first two episodes sent to critics. 24 will probably never seem so bracingly new as it did last year, but the heightened stakes give it new urgency and depth. More than it was in the first season, it's a direct examination of what we will do for safety (and in the premiere's stunning conclusion, Jack makes brutally clear what he'll do). Unfortunately, the story line that puts Bauer's daughter in jeopardy again is badly contrived, like last season's soap-opera twist in which his wife got amnesia. But the screen hums whenever Sutherland's on it; he transcends 24's spare dialogue, creating Bauer's bitterness and nobility out of pauses and hard-eyed stares. This should spell another year of recognition for Sutherland, but is the longtime movie actor willing to stick it out in TV? "Ask me again in five years," he says. Or five long, long days.