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On Jack's runaway train

February 11 2003

Kiefer Sutherland and Sarah Wynter

Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, left, and Australian actress Sarah Wynter, who has joined the cast for the second season.

Michael Idato signs on for another long day in the life of Kiefer Sutherland and the cast of 24.

It is five minutes past four in the afternoon and all hell has broken loose. I am strapped into my seat on board a small government jet. Beside me, special agent Jack Bauer is furiously trying to transmit our co-ordinates before the tower loses track of us.

Across the cabin the air is thick with tension. A federal agent has unholstered his weapon, our prisoner - her identity a secret for the moment - is refusing to answer his question, and the smooth cruise of the plane has gone from a tremble to a shudder.

Our predicament, you might say, is looking a little tight.

"Cut," yells director Rodney Charters, a New Zealander who is a veteran of American television, with credits including The Commish, Roswell and The Pretender. Bauer, better known as actor Kiefer Sutherland, breaks into a smile and the tension immediately dissipates.

"That was good," Charters says. He is happy, Sutherland is happy, which means we are all happy.

Like most things in Hollywood, though, the fabric of reality stretches only as far as the edge of the camera frame. Our government jet is merely an impressive mock-up suspended in the studio on gimbals, which lend it an eerily realistic shudder. "Riding the gimbal", I am quietly assured, is indeed a rare honour, reserved for actors, stuntmen - and this visiting journalist.

Even the director has to remain on the stage floor.

The guns, too, are fakes, but the tension is real. After all, television is a big business and the attention to minor detail in a multimillion-dollar production like 24 is exhausting.

"Time is a minor detail," Sutherland says. "We take it for granted to such a degree, but when you actually have to focus on an hour and what you can accomplish in an hour, and you know that there is going to be a result at the end of the hour, the fact that it is ticking off in the right-hand corner creates that kind of angst."

Angst is right. Last year's first season of 24 was a heart-stopping hit. Bauer raced against time in 24, one-hour episodes played out weekly in real time - that is, each episode represented an hour of his day - to defeat a complex plot involving the abduction of his family and the attempted assassination of a senator.

The day, sold in television promos as the "longest day of Jack Bauer's life", ended in tragedy with the death of his wife, Terri (Leslie Hope). As the second season opens, Jack Bauer is a damaged man.

"He doesn't care as much," Sutherland says. "When he is asked to do something and he makes a choice to go there and do that, he is angry, and out of that comes a lot of bad things.

"His respect for life is probably not going to be what it was in the first year. His respect for anything is not going to be the same - authority, other people - and over the course of this season that will be something he will have to deal with."

The shift to TV was a big change for Sutherland, who is best known as a film actor with roles as diverse as Stand By Me (1987), The Lost Boys (1987) and A Time To Kill (1996). He has no regrets. "I have watched over the last five years a huge transition - shows like The West Wing, E.R. and The Sopranos - a lot of programming on television that was better than a lot of the movies I was seeing. It was certainly better than a lot of the movies I was, in fact, making.

"From that perspective, if you are trying something you think is interesting, new and fresh, the stigma of swapping mediums is not nearly what it used to be - certainly when I started. I was very, very lucky."

The second worst day of Bauer's life comes 16 months after the first: he is estranged from his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert); Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is now the United States president and has divorced his wife, Sherry (Penny Johnson Jerald).

A new threat emerged in the opening scenes last night, folding Kate Warner (Sarah Wynter) and her family into the story, with Bauer returning to the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) with only 24 hours to defuse it.

Sutherland and his co-stars describe the real-time format as invigorating for them. Johnson Jerald says between takes:

"Finally, you are working on a project where you are doing what you were trained to do. We get to play it moment by moment, understanding where you came from, your relationship with people and your relationship inside the situation.

"You have to remember all those continuity quirks - What time is it? Where was I a moment ago? Jacket on, jacket off? Rhythm of movement - and I think that is challenging. We are not walking through this. We are earning our money, and I like that."

Xander Berkeley, who plays CTU chief George Mason, says the real-time technique is an uneasy dynamic to the show. "One of the fun things about it is that it remains open to question. It's almost between what the writers write, how we interpret what they write and play it, how the editors cut it and how the music supervisor scores it. It's a collaboration of impressions."

And there might be more to Mason, Berkeley hints, than meets the eye. "The best way to play parts where the guy turns out to have an agenda or something bad going on is to play against it. I see him as a guy who has a job to do, who started out maybe being a young do-gooder and got involved in a system that turned out to be corrupt at a lot of different steps along the way."

Just what happens in the second season is a secret. Berkeley says: "Tension still runs high, and for me personally there seems to be redemption. As for the show itself, I haven't really discussed what I am at liberty to divulge."

Johnson Jerald is more candid. "It's balanced between action and guesswork. Loving someone, hating them, not understanding what they are doing and then truly understanding it. It's a guessing game, but it's a game you want to tune into and be a part of."

A number of details, including the identity of the mystery woman on board the government jet, have been deliberately excluded from this article. (If you really want to know what happens, visit

Although the fact that Australian actress Sarah Wynter has joined the cast is no secret, she is also keeping mum. "I can't say too much," she says. "The first season of 24 ended like a film, so this is a new day in Jack Bauer's life and I am allowed to say that I am a potential love interest."

But don't expect wedding bells - their paths may not cross for some time. Sutherland says: "We are quite far in, and our storylines have not crossed yet." He is probably revealing a little more than he ought. "But we worked together when she auditioned for the part and she is great."

As the series opens, Wynter's character, Kate Warner, has reservations about her sister's fiance. "I suspect he may have shady dealings in his past and I dig around a little and find something much, much worse, which brings me into contact with the CTU.

"When I get a new script I am turning the pages with excitement. The show is fantastic and the fans are so excited, but having said that, they have already taken the risks and taken the chances and I have jumped on when it's already a runaway train, so I feel like a bit of a cheat.

"I'm thrilled, though, that they are sustaining what they did last year, and even surpassing it. One of the reasons I didn't want to do television for so long was because I didn't want to get stuck playing the same character, day in, day out. Even a really good series tends to have boundaries.

"But this is such a different format.

"We are challenged by the real-time format and I feel like I'm making a one-hour film every week. I really do love it."

24 screens at 8.30pm on Channel 7 on Mondays.



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