“I was mortified”: why Kiefer Sutherland hasn’t watched himself act since 1986
He might be best known these days for torturing, whoops, I mean ‘interrogating’ baddies in 24, but children of the 1980s will remember Kiefer Sutherland as an adolescent heartthrob.
He appeared in a number of classics from the decade when he was still in his 20s, and would go on to pop up in other acclaimed movies later in his life, such as A Few Good Men and Phone Booth, but this was easily his golden age.
The Canadian star, who was recently arrested for allegedly assaulting a driver, first came to most people’s attention in the 1986 film Stand By Me, adapted from Stephen King’s novella The Body, which follows four kids on their life-changing journey to gawk at a dead body, and had Sutherland play John ‘Ace’ Merril, the leader of a gang of bullies who torments our heroes throughout the film.
Viewers loved it when it came out, the screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, so the critics loved it, and so it picked up a couple of nods at the Golden Globes, including one for the late, great Rob Reiner. In the years since its release, the film has only grown in popularity and status, and Sutherland must be incredibly proud to be associated with such a staple of cinema, you would think, but apparently, it caused him a trauma so large that it changed his entire life.
Speaking to HuffPost in 2014, the Emmy-winning star revealed that Stand By Me fundamentally changed the way he viewed his profession, recalling a special cast and crew screening of the film, which he attended with a woman he was dating at the time, and how what he saw that day left him horrified.
“We watched the movie, and everything I thought I wanted to do, I hadn’t done at all,” he said, “All I saw was myself up there, and I was mortified, and my girlfriend was saying, ‘I thought it was really great’. I said, ‘Don’t patronise me. I need to get another job. If I don’t get another job and this comes out, I’m dead, and my career is over’.” No prizes for guessing how long that relationship lasted.
While Sutherland probably could have handled this situation better in the moment, it’s important to give this situation some context, which is that, as stated earlier, he was very young, barely out of his teens. Stand By Me was supposed to be his big break, and if he thought that it wasn’t up to scratch, then you can understand why he was so upset.
Also, we’re talking about the son of one of the all-time greats here: Kiefer’s father, Donald Sutherland, is acting royalty, so he was naturally going to compare himself to his old man.
It’s no wonder his standards were so high, but as we all know, Stand By Me, The Lost Boys, and many of Sutherland’s other efforts from this period are all definitely worth watching again…well, maybe not Renegades, he was absolutely right to skip over that one.
