The cast for Season 8 - John Boyd, Katee Sackhoff, Mykelti Williamson, Mary Lynn Pyskub, Freddie Prinze Jr Annie Wersching, Kiefer Sutherland, Anil Kapoor, Cherry Jones and Chirs Diamantopoulos © Fox
One of the most innovative and acclaimed dramas on television, 24, returns for an eighth season – and one more horrendously intense day for Jack Bauer, aka Kiefer Sutherland.
Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) © Fox
When we started shooting 24, it was about five months before the terrible events of 9/11. So our objective is to create this unbelievably fast-paced dramatic circumstance that takes place in the 24-hour period. The fact that it actually aligned with things that were happening in the news and made it relevant was really something that caught us completely off-guard. I think one of the things that an audience has been able to relate to is there is some resolution.
I think we live in a world with regard to terrorism that is a constant fear, and we very often feel very helpless about it.
Whereas Jack Bauer in the context of this show, and the other characters in the context of this show, actually are doing something, and somehow the audience becomes a part of that. So I think in many ways that alleviated a lot of stress that people were feeling on a day-to-day basis.
Do you expect or want 24 to continue past this season?
Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and Cole Ortiz (Freddie Prinze) © Fox
We’ve always approached each season, just the task of doing it, as so great that literally from the very first season on, we’ve completed that season, and it was really Fox’s decision to pick us up. There’s never been one specific season that the next season was guaranteed or ensured. This has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, the ability to do 24. So for me, yeah. It’s something that is absolutely open. I’ve always said that as long as people wanted us to make it, and people were really interested in watching it, I would be interested.
There are a lot of components involved. The task of writing it is far greater than the task of acting in it.
You say it’s harder to write than act in. But this is the eighth season, is it getting harder for you to do?
Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) © Fox
I would have to think that Jack Bauer is probably a little slower now. But there’s a kind of adrenaline that kicks in. A lot of the physical stuff that we get to do happens in bursts. It’s not sustained over a 12-hour day. So you get very excited when you’re doing that.
I haven’t had a break from it for eight years, so I couldn’t really tell you what it would be like to come back to it. Rodney Charters, our cinematographer, and I were sitting together, they had thrown an event for us for our 150th episode, and they put together a montage from the very beginning through the 150th episode, and Rodney and I were laughing and thinking, ‘Oh, how cool all this is.’ And then about halfway through the [film clips], they showed some pictures of us from Season 1. We realized that we had aged and we stopped laughing.
The first 10 minutes of this season it looks like Jack is finally happy.
What Howard Gordon and the other writers did, which was such a fantastic thing for me as an actor, was they put Jack in such a positive place at the very beginning of this series that it gave him something to fight for. I think just inherently we have taken a character in some very dark places, the loss of his wife, the estrangement from his daughter, the death of Kim Raver’s character. And one of the great things as an actor is to be able to take all those kind of tragedies and mount those as part of the character for the following season.
To be able to start Season 8 with some kind of hope and give him something to really live for and fight for was really different and a very exciting place to be as a character and it really has some resonance throughout the later episodes.
I think it’s the first time I’ve seen Jack smile for years.
The only time Jack Bauer smiled was when he finally captured Nina in Season 3, and he was flying back with her on the cargo plane and he had her in handcuffs, he looked at her and smiled. And that was about four episodes before he got to shoot her. (he laughs) So this was a different kind of smile.
I must say when we first shot it, it felt awkward for me and I think everybody else involved. [It didn’t last long], because it’s a guarantee that he’s going to have a bad day on our show!
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