Kiefer: Men's Vogue

Kiefer Sutherland rides his horse, Yogi, across an open field at Ventura Farms in Thousand Oaks, California.

On the twenty-first of December Kiefer Sutherland turned 40, but he has already tried on many lives for size. He's had two families to support (three if you count the crew of his television show, 24). He has lived out of the back of a Mustang on the beach, and on a 900-acre ranch in Montana. He is a father and a grandfather. He's been a Brat Packer and a rodeo champion. He has been famously lucky and infamously unlucky in love. He has a film production unit and an indie record label. He's made nearly 50 movies, but has known what it is like to sit by a phone that does not ring. Jude Cole, his best friend and business partner in the record label, tells me that Sutherland will never mellow. "I always think of him as Keith Richards the actor," he says. "There are very few human beings who can stand the punishment of working and playing that hard and always come back for more, but Kiefer is one."

When I meet him at his home in Los Angeles, Sutherland himself smiles at the idea. He puts his multiple lives down to a certain impatience; perhaps it's genetic—something he inherited from his wayward father, Donald Sutherland, or his charismatic grandfather, Canada's first socialist premier, Tommy Douglas. "I was always anxious to get going," Sutherland says of his early years, which felt like "a life out of a Rod Stewart song" at times. "I got married at 19, had kids early. But after a while you realize growing up is a lifelong process. Am I grown up now in the sense I can get up early, take my kids to school, go to work, get home? Yes. But are there much larger questions that I haven't been able to find any good answers to: how to be in love, or how to be on my own for any real period of time. Yes, I'm still working on those. I think those questions always come back to how you feel about yourself. Some days I feel good. Some days I wish things were different."

Today, I guess, is a good day, not least in that it is a rare day away from the set of 24—a 10-month-a-year, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day commitment. With the air of a truanting schoolboy, Sutherland takes me from his spectacular warehouse of a home on the rundown fringes of L.A.'s Silver Lake district to his favorite local Italian restaurant. Over lunch he laughs easily, enjoys the low cadences of his voice as he talks, slips outside occasionally for a drag on a cigarette. By 40, we all have the face we deserve. Kiefer Sutherland's is tanned, bright-eyed, lean. He has lost the puppy fat of his early Stand By Me years, which gave him a louche quality. Instead, he looks like Jack Bauer, his alter ego on 24, might look if he ever got a few good nights' sleep.

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