a hero for dark times; Give Kiefer Sutherland 24 hours, and he will save the world.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

A black car pulls up in front of a Hollywood cafe and a cool blond man in sharp shades snaps open a silver cell phone while checking himself in the mirror. Kiefer? No. From around the corner comes a sweetly rumpled teenager in his late 30s, his eyes blue and naked to the world, the neckband of his colorless T-shirt utterly frayed. He holds out the hand that doesn't have the large white bandage on it and sits down. Kiefer, of course.

He returns to the screen next month as the agent Jack Bauer in a new season of 24, the Fox series that has become an addiction for viewers and made Sutherland a cult hero. Sutherland's pale face and slender body seem all the more vulnerable and human against the dark background of computers and monstrous threats: so far political assassination, a nuclear bomb, and a virus. For the fourth time, sadder, wiser, deeper, and a little more flawed, Jack Bauer will have to choose whom to sacrifice and whom to save to protect our homeland.

"At some point," says Sutherland, "it's going to be silly to watch the same guy have so many bad days." At the moment, he's happy in the role, fourteen hours a day, five days a week, ten months a year. During this year's hiatus he went to New Zealand to star in River Queen. Tempted as he was to get a Maori tattoo-his biceps are already adorned with a Celtic garland, crosses, a Virgin of Guadalupe-he held off: They take a long time to heal, and he was naked in the film.

The finger is bandaged because he almost lost its tip in a scene shot two days earlier. He's also fractured a kneecap and broken a wrist but adds, "I'm not as accident prone as my father." He was born in 1966, the son of Donald Sutherland, who named him Kiefer after Warren Kiefer, the director of The Castle of the Living Dead. He was raised by his mother, Shirley Douglas, an actress and director, and began acting at ten, when a child who could play the violin was required for a play about the Lodz ghetto. He was most inclined toward music, mainly ...