‘You have to pay for what you used to get for free’

Kiefer Sutherland talks to Louis Chilton about his Christmas comedy 'Tinsel Town', the 'ironic' state of modern television, and why his acting style is so different from that of his father

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“I’m sliding into 60 years old at 100 miles an hour,” says sprightly 58-year-old Kiefer Sutherland, “and I’m acutely aware of the fact that people cared more about what I thought when I was 30 than they do now.”

Whether or not this is true, it's a fear that Sutherland - upstart son-of-a-legend turned all-action TV icon in the guise of 24's Jack Bauer - has harnessed to compelling effect in recent years. It's something he interrogated when he gave what may have been a career-best performance in 2023, playing a pitiful naval commander in William Friedkin's final film The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

"Everything about that character came down to being marginalised," he says. "What happens when you hit an age in life when you're redundant, when you don't matter, when no one cares what you think. And when I put aspects of my own personal feelings into the character, for the first time, I felt empathy for him. He wasn't an asshole any more."

Sutherland, to be fair, doesn't really seem like one either. He's talking to me ahead of the release of Tinsel Town, a Christmas comedy dripping with self-parody in which he plays a Hollywood action star shanghaied into the Yorkshire Christmas panto scene. His character, Brad Mack, is a showbiz blowhard, whose dormant soft side takes some belligerent prompting - from his semi-estranged daughter, and a choreographer played by Rebel Wilson - to emerge. "The Brits do this kind of movie better than anybody," says Sutherland. "Like The Full Monty... it's just that small-town, heartfelt English story.