Breaking your little toe really hurts. I’ve broken my ankle, my wrist, my elbow, ribs, collarbone, my kneecaps, most of those filming 24 – but the most painful was my pinkie toe. There was a bomb sequence where things were exploding all around me and I was a bit slow getting to my mark and I got hit. It doesn’t sound very butch but it made my eyes water.
Do what you want. That was the single most important thing I learned from my parents, because they did. My dad [Donald], as an actor, went where the work was, my mother [Shirley Douglas] was an actress and a political activist. The choices they made were maybe not the best choices as a parent but they were the best for their lives. So by the time I was 15 and I wanted to leave school and become an actor I had no guilt and both of them, to their credit, let me.
You can learn something as an adult and still become good at it. And it opens your whole world up. When I started rodeo I’d never picked up a rope, let alone worked with a horse before. I never cooked before I was a grownup, mainly because I didn’t want to poison my children.
Being a twin taught me the value of having a companion. Every time I experienced something I could turn to my left and share it. When I was having my first child I said to my mother, “My gosh you had two at the same time.” She said, “Oh, sweetheart, it was fine. By the time you were two you were looking after each other.” She made it sound like she’d got a deal, which always made me laugh. My sister Rachel and I are incredibly close.
I have an almost physical reaction if I’m away from nature too long. I’ll suddenly realise I’ve been in the city or on the road and I haven’t had a quiet moment in a field, or walking in a wood for a while. And I have to go fix that pretty quickly.
My greatest fear is of being humiliated. The very first time I ever played a gig, I was scared so bad that my right hand started to shake. As a guitar player that’s really bad, and I remember a guy laughing in the audience. But it pissed me off so much that I booked another show for the next night.
At the age of 19 I was completely unprepared to have a child. All the way through [Kiefer’s first wife] Camelia’s pregnancy I remember thinking I was going to be the best father ever. When she was born all of that went out the window.
You can’t not be political when you come from a family like mine. My grandfather Tommy Douglas was the premier of Saskatchewan and I’ve never met anybody who lived by a stronger moral compass: he got ferocious if he thought something was unjust. He taught me how to drive a car in a dirt parking lot in Ontario when I was 13 years old.
I was very aware of the stigma of an actor putting out a record. I went, “Oh fuck it, I’m going to do it anyway.”
For Kiefer Sutherland’s tour dates, visit kiefersutherlandmusic.com
