Down the Rabbit Hole: Kiefer Sutherland runs for his life again

Kiefer Sutherland has two creative careers he pursues: screen acting and country music performer. By virtue of a lengthy film career and then the enduring hit television series 24, the 56-year-old is best known for his acting, but with three albums of authentic 1970s-tinged country rock in the last seven years, and lengthy stints on a tour bus, Sutherland has earned his dues as a respected singer-songwriter.

Now that Sutherland is returning to television, with the high-profile Paramount+ thriller Rabbit Hole, he believes his work in both mediums as being fundamentally similar. Whether he’s shooting a scene or cutting a song, Sutherland sees himself as part of a tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of television and popular music respectively.

Keifer Sutherland: in Rabbit Hole he’s turned upside down and told “Run for your life!”Credit:Marni Grossman/Paramount+

“It all stems back to storytelling, so there has to be a lineage regardless of the technical pronouncements that get changed and developed over time, whether it’s a streaming service as a means of delivery or the actually cameras and lens that we use to make it,” Sutherland says. “The root of it is still story. Throw on an episode of I Love Lucy and you’ll find it as current today as it was in 1950.”

Wearing a black jumper and maintaining a thoughtful outlook through a day of promotional interviews, Sutherland is a television veteran who’s intrigued by the industry’s transformation. It’s more than two decades since 24 debuted, a show whose real-time narration squeezed an eventful single day in the life of Sutherland’s US federal agent Jack Bauer into a 24-episode season, and he sees his new show as another step forward.

“What I do think is really interesting about the evolution of storytelling within television is that we’ve given ourselves more room. We’re not going to live by the strict standards and practices created by a network,” Sutherland says. “We’re going to take the freedom that the film industry has had and use language that is current and on the street, we’re going to talk about current themes, and we’re going to film them in a way that is present.

“So at the end of the day the characters are different but the tent poles of the genre are the same. If you take a look at The Fugitive back in the ’60s and you take a look at our show now, the tent pole is a thriller is that you take your lead character, turn them upside down on the ground and tell them, ‘Run for your life!’ That’s true back then and it’s true now.”

In Rabbit Hole Sutherland plays John Weir, an accomplished American corporate spy who takes the wrong job and finds himself framed for murder with his mugshot on news broadcasts. The character goes from setting the rules to desperately trying to understand them, an about-flip that’s typical of creators Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, writers and directors whose Hollywood movies, whether it was the grifter drama Focus or the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love, delight in showing audiences just enough to set them up for an audacious plot twist.

“The thing that I learned about their writing, which attracted me from the first script and was something I came to relish over making the next seven was that they have big ideas but they leave them understated,” Sutherland says. “Their humour is like that, too. There are lines that are really clever and funny and those lines have to be handled really delicately because you can tread on them so quickly and have them not work. It’s interesting how delicate a lot of their material is even when it’s going 150 miles an hour.”

Rabbit Hole’s surreptitious aims extend to genre. There’s flinty banter between Weir and an innocent bystander, Hailey Winton (Meta Golding), who gets roped into his quest for exoneration because of Weir’s paranoia, a droll sense of humour, and a flashback structure that establishes Sutherland’s character as the child of an earlier age of paranoia that has now fully flowered in the interconnected 21st century.

“The thing that’s very different is the backdrop of our show, which is the technological revolution that’s changing how we communicate with one another,” Sutherland says. “Our thriller has gone very Orwellian, because we’re talking about mysterious hands manipulating our personal information in ways we can’t understand to control our money, our voting, dictating what we like.”

Once Game of Thrones star Charles Dance starts delivering alarming exposition (with impeccable diction), Rabbit Hole becomes a thriller for the age of Cambridge Analytica, online misinformation, and authoritarian manipulation. The terror plots of 24 have been supplanted by faceless controls. As heightened as it is for television, Rabbit Hole trades on some timely fears.

“There are huge ramifications to what’s happened in the last 10 years. The question was how to monetise the internet and the answer was to sell your information. And there are other people who are even more skilled at what they do with your information,” Sutherland says. “It’s no secret that the internet and social media have been used to rip off a lot of people and it’s something that we’ll have to deal with as a society.”

One thing that hasn’t changed, for both the thriller genre and Sutherland as an actor, is the primacy of a good fight scene. John Weir isn’t quite the unstoppable force that Jack Bauer was, which is fine by Sutherland since he’s got a few more years on the clock now.

“What did my body say? The alarms started going off. Ten years will do what 10 years does – the bones creak a little more, you’re not quite as fast,” Sutherland says. “But the truth is I really enjoy doing it. I embraced that part of 24 and it felt like coming home to block off a street and do a big fight sequence. I enjoy the spectacle of it and I love what we’re trying to accomplish for the viewer and I love the challenge as an actor.”

Rabbit Hole is on Paramount+

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