Sutherland’s Rise Together

This was a film that I’ve been dreaming of making for 30-some-odd years,” Kiefer Sutherland told the audience when Forsaken premiered at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California. In Forsaken, he is directed by his cohort from Fox’s 24, Jon Cassar, who remembers, “We worked together for almost nine years. Between set-ups, we always talked about the kind of movie we’d love to work on together. And he always wanted to do a Western.” Considering their previous success with 24, for which they both earned Emmys, you might expect a high-tech, edgy Sci-Fi Western from the pair. But you would be dead wrong. “I was taking a chance,” Cassar admits, “looking backwards rather than forwards with the Western.” Kiefer plays John Henry Clayton, a Union soldier coming home from the Civil War. But he has taken a decade to return, years he spent as a gun-for-hire. He gives up the guns, but arrives home to find his mother dead, his father, Rev. Clayton (played by Kiefer’s real father, movie icon Donald Sutherland), unforgiving and the love of his life, Mary-Alice Watson (Demi Moore), married and a mother. The hometown where he planned to settle down is under attack by land baron James McCurdy (Deadwood’s Brian Cox), whose gunmen are systematically driving out settlers who refuse to sell land so he can profit from the incoming railroad. Kiefer’s Western roots run deep. He earned his spurs playing “Doc” Scurlock in 1988’s Young Guns I and in the 1990 sequel. He took a couple of years off from acting to become a rancher and rodeo cowboy, and not just for show: Kiefer and partner John English won the U.S. Team Roping Championship in 1998...more