'Designated Survivor' Kiefer Sutherland on his explosive path to the Oval Office
In a crazy election year, could the man who played Jack Bauer be the fictional POTUS who brings us together?
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Kiefer Sutherland is used to playing a man who gets things done, by any means necessary.
So why, after more than 200 episodes as 24 action hero Jack Bauer, would the British-born Canadian want any part of the restrictions of even a fictional U.S. presidency?
Maybe because after years of legislative gridlock, and in an election cycle no TV writer could top for twists, turns, and sheer insanity, ABC's Designated Survivor is hitting the reset button on the federal government this fall, big time.
In the opening minutes of the Sept. 21 pilot, the U.S. Capitol is blown up during the president's State of the Union address. That leaves Sutherland's character, the cabinet member assigned to stay behind, to pick up the pieces.
"When you've taken away the Congress and the Senate and you have to actually put that government back together," there's an opportunity to get things done, Sutherland said during the Television Critics Association's summer meetings, which wrapped up Thursday.
By the second episode, his character, an independent who served as secretary of housing and urban development in a Democratic administration, will be working with the Republicans' designated survivor (Virginia Madsen, American Gothic), Sutherland said when I asked about the restrictions of his character's new job.
"The choices that we get to make in the beginning actually are quite grand, and we actually are quite progressive, in the sense that we get a lot done. And as the government starts to be put back into place, we start to see the wheels grind," he said.
What Sutherland hopes will rise from the ashes of the show's fictional Capitol: "a less divisive conversation about what's really important . . . than I'm watching now."
It that were to happen, it wouldn't be the first time a Sutherland character found his way into the national discourse. The success of 24, which launched in 2001 less than two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, may have been partly fueled by a desire for vengeance, but as the decade wore on, Jack Bauer also came to be seen in some circles as normalizing torture.
With some notable exceptions - 24's corrupt commander-in-chief, Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin), Veep's hilariously inept Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Scandal's well, scandalous Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) - TV presidents tend to be aspirational figures, who are, if not larger than life, at least powerful looking.
Sutherland's Tom Kirkman, who wears glasses and is sworn into office wearing a Cornell hoodie, is distinctly life-size. (Sutherland joked to reporters that, surrounded by fictional Secret Service agents, he's "never felt so short on a show in my life.")
No one (no, not even to get into an ad) is going to call Designated Survivor the feel-good drama of the fall. The body count's simply too high, the events it depicts too frightening.
But it's hard not to see some kind of wish-fulfillment at work in a show about an accidental president we haven't gotten to know well through a long, punishing campaign.
"There's a hunger for outsider candidates. And this is a guy, a character, who is not a political animal, who has not lived a political life, really, and did not have to go through all the machinations of a campaign. So he's coming to it in a sort of innocent way," said executive producer Simon Kinberg.
One thing creator David Guggenheim "talked about from the beginning of developing the show, was that there was a sort of Frank Capra aspect to the show, that there is an actually patriotic wish-fulfillment aspect to it in the same way that, I think, in The West Wing we had an . . . idealized president," Kinberg said.
Sutherland's character is "on this learning curve. He is an innocent person, uncorrupted, at least at the very beginning of his term."
Sutherland himself grew up in a political household.
"It was at our dinner table. My grandfather [Tommy Douglas] was the leader of the NDP [New Democratic Party], which was the federal opposition [party] in Canada. He was responsible for [instituting single-payer universal] health care as the premier of Saskatchewan for [17] years," said the actor, who recalls canvassing for a candidate as a youngster in Toronto.
"Our dinners were interesting in my house. My mom [Shirley Douglas] was an incredibly powerful activist, not only in the United States, but in Canada, as well."
Though he'd like to see President Kirkman channel aspects of Franklin D. Roosevelt ("He came into power in probably the most difficult time in American history since the Civil War"), Sutherland said the speech from the recent conventions that resonated with him in terms of his character was Michelle Obama's.
"I think she went into the White House kicking and screaming. The way she described the first time she put both her daughters into the SUV to go to school was very human. That's how this guy goes into office, as well. But she adapted like nobody I've ever seen," he said.
"But Michelle Obama had almost a two-year campaign to get used to the idea . . . Natascha McElhone, playing my wife, has about 35 minutes."
One president the 49-year-old Sutherland insists he won't be emulating is Harrison Ford's Air Force One character, James Marshall.
"Absolutely not," he said, adding that "the action aspect of the show" will focus on the investigation into the bombing, which will be headed by an FBI agent played by Maggie Q (Nikita).
She'll "report either to my eventual chief of staff or to me, because I don't trust anybody else at that point. So it'll always be a little nefarious, that part of the story, but, no, the president is not going to magically jump up and know how to fight better than anyone [else]. No."
215-854-5950@elgray
ph.ly/EllenGray