Rise to Fame
He played the villain in Stand By Me and the vampire leader in The Lost Boys before anyone cast him as a lead. That changed when 24 premiered weeks after 9/11 and turned Jack Bauer into a one-man counterterrorism franchise. The real-time format was a gimmick, but Sutherland made Bauer compulsively watchable, tense, physically raw, morally murky in ways that fit the moment. Fox signed him to a $40 million deal for three seasons in 2006, roughly $555,000 an episode. He won the Emmy that year too.
In the Spotlight
After 24 wrapped, he landed Designated Survivor as the accidental president, solid show, three seasons, gone. He's been touring as a country-Americana singer-songwriter since 2016, which sounds like a vanity project but has gotten genuinely respectful reviews. In January 2026, he got arrested in Hollywood after an alleged altercation with a rideshare driver. The LA County DA's office sent the case back for further investigation. It's not his first arrest, or his third, and at this point his legal history reads like a parallel career.
Side Notes
His grandfather Tommy Douglas gave Canada universal healthcare. His father is Donald Sutherland, who died in 2024, and Forsaken (2015) was the first time the two shared a scene on screen despite decades of parallel careers. He and Robert Downey Jr. shared an apartment for roughly three years in the late 1980s and are reportedly still close. He voiced Venom Snake in Metal Gear Solid V and co-founded a Canadian whisky brand called Red Bank. The man runs multiple parallel lives and none of them overlap.