Kiefer Sutherland Says He Couldn't Turn Down a '24' Revival

Kiefer Sutherland has said he is "always open" to a 24 revival with the star admitting that his character Jack Bauer will always be close to his heart.

The prolific actor will always be tied to the character he played for nine seasons spanning a decade. Now Sutherland has revealed his joy at returning to the world of counter-terrorism espionage for his latest role in the action movie The Contractor.

Sutherland described Jack Bauer as a sort of comfort blanket in his acting career.

"Jack Bauer as a character is kind of like a kid's blanket for me. There was something kind of nice about feeling that again," he told Newsweek. He added that the door is always open for a reboot.

"I've learned to not say no to the 24 [reboot]. I said no, and then I went and did a ninth season.

"So you know, that's really going to be up to the writers and if they figure something out—and they might not—[but] if they figure something out, that actually involves me, so...

"But I'm always open to it," he continued. "I love playing that character. That character is very different to me. You know, Jack Bauer might not have succeeded in all the things that he tried to succeed, but there was a kind of there was a moral compass that he had, that I felt was very honest and true."

"And this character [Rusty in The Contractor] is not exactly that," he said.

As Rusty Jennings, Sutherland plays a mysterious veteran and head of an elite military operation in the action movie fronted by Chris Pine.

Rusty may not have the same moral compass as Jack Bauer, but Sutherland noted that a return to the action genre and plots about counter-terrorism are right up his street.

"Yes. It's very different. But certainly, the genre is very much in the same world and it was nice to [revisit] that kind of the dialogue and all the vernacular and terminology that was used so well in this [film] is stuff that certainly I was familiar with," he said.

In The Contractor, written by J.P. Davis, Pine leads the cast as Special Forces Sergeant James Harper, who is involuntarily discharged from the Army and cut off from his pension.

In debt, out of options and desperate to provide for his family, Harper contracts with a private underground military force, led by Sutherland's Rusty.

"My character Rusty is a guy who recruits men who are coming out of the Special Forces—whether it be the Navy, Marines, Army—and he uses them for private ops for private companies, which is a world that I really didn't know a lot about," Sutherland said.

Pine and Sutherland star alongside Ben Foster in the film. Foster plays Mike, a fellow veteran who introduces Harper to the fraught world of the private military.

Sutherland likened Pine and Foster to one of Hollywood's great duos and said the chance to work with them was also a major draw.

"The thing that really attracted me to the piece was, I'm just such a huge fan of Chris Pine and Ben Foster, their work in Hell or High Water, I just thought was really one of the first times I've seen kind of a fantastic duo like Paul Newman and Robert Redford," he said.

"So I was just really excited to be in a film with them."

Gillian Jacobs, Eddie Marsan, JD Pardo, and Florian Munteanu also star in The Contractor.

The Contractor is in theaters now.