A few weeks ago, Julian Sands, most fondly remembered as the romantic lead in A Room with a View, was invited to a party to celebrate the 100th episode of the real-time thriller series 24. It was held in the “beautiful” set used to house 24’s antiterrorist agency in Los Angeles — real agents, I am assured, are jealous — but what the Yorkshire-born actor recalls most vividly is the guest list. There were a lot of ghosts.

“It was Valhalla, home for the slain,” muses the 48-year-old, running his hand through his spiky blond hair. “There was the actress who played the mole Nina Myers (shot by Jack), and George Mason (ditto), and Dennis Haysbert (the former president, assassinated, finally), and I was thinking — am I about to join their club?” Sands, who is about to emerge out of the shadows, in the fifth series of 24, as the next “big bad”, knows his chances of survival are somewhere between “hmmm” and “bye-bye”. Even Kiefer Sutherland says that, one day, maybe when ratings are slipping, his Jack Bauer might meet a sticky end. And he is a producer on the show.

“The writers are extremely ruthless, although they are nervous about saying where my character is from,” says Sands. “I see Vladimir Bierko as a westernised Chechen, an oil billionaire who longs for Soviet days. He is as pure and still as Ted Hughes’s hawk — ‘There is no sophistry in my body:/My manners are tearing off heads’.” Yes, it’s another elegant Brit in Hollywood, playing baddies for bucks. Alan and Jeremy must have been too pricey.

It is the drizzly, hungover dawn after the Oscars. We are sitting in a West Hollywood coffee shop, on a strip of Sunset Boulevard used for Timecode. There, in 2000, the British director Mike Figgis ran Sands, Salma Hayek and Holly Hunter through a cinematic exercise in real time, with split screens and running clocks. Sound familiar?

Time and events do seem to repeat around the quietly thoughtful actor. He was three when his father abandoned his family, which Sands puts down to “permissive times”. Then, two decades on, he himself quit his wife, Sarah, leaving her with a six-month-old son. Everyone survived, even thrived. Sarah Sands, always a driven journalist, went on to edit The Sunday Telegraph, until her abrupt dismissal earlier this month. Today, they both care for Henry, who is now at a Scottish university, but coincidence? “It’s not significant. Sarah was 18, I was 21. We were just too young. Deserted is a bit strong. It was nothing to do with my own background, just our years, and I have been very happily married (to Evgenia Citkowitz, traditionally described as a Guinness heiress) for nearly 20 years since then. So no family traits there.”

One last circle, then: five years ago, 24 rescued Kiefer Sutherland, the often self-destructive son of Donald, from the oblivion of straight-to-video movies. Was a similar career redemption what the producers of 24 had in mind when they reached out to Sands, star of cinematic horrors such as Warlock? At the time, he was unemployed, and living a childhood dream of climbing the Matterhorn. (Yes, 22 months shy of 50, he is that fit.) “I don’t know what they saw in me,” he says. “I’d never actually seen 24 before I got the phone call in Zermatt. But I was hooked from Day One, Hour One. How could you not want to be part of that?”

So, Sands has, for the first time in his life, become a commuter, driving up the 405 freeway from his Hollywood Hills home to the suburb of Chatsworth, where 24 is shot on two huge sound stages. During the drive, he listens to opera. “I’m enjoying the space between home and work, which I never really had before,” he says.

“The writers have not given me a great deal to work with, but they know I can work with a little. I am conspiring to unleash poison gas in LA, from inside an 8 by 12 concrete bunker, tapping computers and talking on mobile phones. This is modern power.”

Sands avoided a theatrical Slav accent because Dennis Hopper pounded one to death in the first series. Instead, Sands chills by doing as little as possible. You can see the hawk. No matter how long he survives — and he promises pyrotechnics — his is a quietly unnerving performance.

It is almost as unnerving as the Tony Blair he portrayed in David Hare’s Stuff Happens, on stage in LA last year. Every night, he nailed the PM’s shifty sweatiness, then cycled home to shake him off. How did he set out to play a man he once respected, and saw from afar fray and fade? “Blair’s fatal flaw was vanity — he had surrounded himself with yes men and wanted to play with the big boys. He really is a tragic figure. So much hope, gone.”

Sands can act, projecting an intense purpose. He was convincing as The Sunday Times’s veteran foreign correspondent Jon Swain in The Killing Fields, capturing Swain’s resolve and angry compassion. Anne Rice wanted him, not Tom Cruise, to play Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. And he has earned kudos in European films such as Night Sun and The Loss of Sexual Innocence. But these have been overshadowed by some terrible choices, including Boxing Helena. Sands has sometimes taken the easy money, which, Guinness- heiress spouse or not, it does not sound like he needs.

So, can 24, which has spawned video games and DVDs, do a Kiefer Sutherland and rescue Sands from his own back pages? After this adrenaline rush ends, he has nothing planned, giving him time off to hike his beloved Hollywood canyons. However, he promises there are no more follies in the pipeline. The riddle of Sands’s success may be about to be resolved.

24 is showing on Sky One, Sundays at 9pm; 24: The Game (set between seasons two and three) is reviewed in Games.