Kiefer Sutherland has spent decades embodying authority figures, outlaws, presidents, and men who don’t blink under pressure. On Bloor Street, he finally admits the moments that scared him most weren’t written in a script. They were punctuated by a metal screech, a flashing light, and the sound of a county jail gate slamming shut.
“There ain’t no sound I learned to hate more than the sound of the county jail gate,” Sutherland said, remembering the moment that sparked one of the record’s most unsettling songs. He’d been watching a movie alone when a prison release scene triggered something physical. “I got nauseous,” he said. “I looked at the TV and went, ‘Man…’ and that was it. Off went the TV. I went to the kitchen island and started writing.”
“County Jail Gate” isn’t performative remorse. It’s blunt self-indictment. “First of all, you’ve made a really dumb mistake to be in that position,” he said. “When you hear that sound, that’s it. There’s no going back. There’s no saying sorry. You’re going inside. This is gonna happen.”
Sutherland doesn’t dodge his history. “I’ve gone to jail a few times,” he said flatly. The humiliation lingers. “You’re so cross and angry with yourself that you’ve allowed yourself to do something so stupid and lazy. A thousand different choices could have made that not happen.” He laughed while telling it, but only in hindsight. “I’m laughing out of embarrassment and absolute humility.”
That song, he realized later, wasn’t about punishment. It was about the first step out. “By the time you start singing, ‘This ain’t no way to live,’ you’re angry—but not at anybody else. This is all you.” Writing it was “the process of beginning to move past it,” something he didn’t understand until it was finished.
That self-awareness feels especially sharp coming from a man best known as television’s most relentless enforcer. For nearly a decade, Sutherland was Jack Bauer on 24, the ticking-clock avatar of American certainty. He loved the role. “The gift of a lifetime for an actor,” he called it. But when 24 ended, certainty didn’t follow. “It didn’t mean I could just immediately go into something in the same genre,” he said. “That development process takes years.”
Acting, he’s learned, doesn’t always reward instinct. “You don’t get the choice,” he said. “Even if you’ve been relatively successful, there’s a lot out of your control.” He offered a blunt hypothetical that still nags at him. “If every actor could just do what they were moved by spiritually and creatively, the landscape of film and television would be very different.”
Music, by contrast, offered immediacy and control. “I can sit down and write a song and say, ‘This is what I want it to sound like,’” he said. “I’m in control of that.” Acting, even after decades of success, is not. “There is a lot out of my control.” He summed it up with a shrugging metaphor: acting is grocery shopping on a Sunday. Songwriting is farming. “You pick when it’s ready.”
That sense of agency deepened during lockdown, when motion stopped altogether. After years of filming Designated Survivor in Toronto, then logging roughly 500 shows on the road, the pandemic forced a hard pause. “You’re home,” he said. “You’re not allowed to see your friends. You’re not allowed to see your kids. I don’t know what else you do but be reflective.”
Reflection led him back to gratitude—and to history. Soon after Bloor Street was finished, Sutherland stepped into the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for The First Lady. Once he locked into the cadence, the role opened up. “Once you have the voice down of a historical character, the rest is just so much fun,” he said. “FDR had such a distinctive voice, it actually made it easier.”
He said the same was true years earlier when he portrayed William S. Burroughs in Beat. That role still resonates with him—not because Burroughs was admirable in every way, but because he was uncompromisingly honest. “I never felt that Burroughs lied,” Sutherland said. “I didn’t have to like everything he said, but I respected that he was coming from a place of truth.”
That mattered. Burroughs’ life, contradictions included, represented something Sutherland values deeply. “They were trailblazers,” he said of the Beat generation. “They were figuring out writing, lifestyle, sexuality—just questioning everything. And that questioning is really important.”
It’s the same thread that runs from a jail cell to Jack Bauer’s interrogation room to Roosevelt’s fireside calm. Control versus consequence. Power versus humility. On Bloor Street, those ideas stop being abstract. They get personal. The authority figure admits the mistake. The action hero listens to the gate close. And the songwriter, finally stationary, decides to write it down before the sound fades.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
