Smash hit

Although he’s unlikely to joke about the offence itself, he has made light of his time in prison, telling chat-show host David Letterman recently that he was in the prison showers when he dropped the soap and didn’t dare pick it up. “It was at that point I decided that soap was overrated.”

It must have been far from funny, though, being a famous face in a jail full of gang members and hardened lags, I suggest. “I was certainly very aware of who was near me, who was behind me and who was in front of me. I got to do work, which was a good thing.

“But I did spend a lot of time in lock-down, which was a drag, because they couldn’t guarantee my safety. So I was in a small cell, sometimes for days at a time. It would depend on who they had coming in. It was a county jail so you know, they would be doing gang raids where they were locking up these really dangerous guys, and that’s when I’d get stuck in my cell for a long time.”

He was in prison over Christmas, New Year and his 42nd birthday, which can’t have been easy. “No, but it was one of those times when you go, ‘Well, I can either bitch about the seven or eight weeks, or however long you are there for, or I can think, well, I haven’t had a break like this for a while and do some push-ups and learn how to fold [laundry] properly and take some time to think about what you are doing.’ And I did those things. Is it somewhere that I plan on going back to? No. But I did try to make the most of it.”

We meet for lunch at a restaurant near his home and he turns up, on foot, with no fuss, no sign of bodyguards or PR minders. This is clearly a regular haunt and Sutherland is greeted like a long-lost son before ordering pasta with chicken breast and a bottle of water.

We sit outside, so we can smoke. The cacophony from the traffic on North Vermont Avenue, east of Hollywood, provides the background to our conversation. We’re a long way from the moneyed peace of Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades where Sutherland could afford a gated mansion or two. Instead, he prefers a former foundry located a few blocks away, which he bought to use as a base for his record label, Ironworks Music (rock’n’roll is a big passion), and ended up living in, with his collection of vintage guitars and his 20-year-old daughter, Sarah Jude, who often comes to stay.

“I really like it around here. Yes, there’s a little edge to it, but there’s a real community thing going on.” He pauses and grins. “But it’s best not to walk your dog too late at night,” a reference to the time he was held up, at gunpoint, while taking his border collie, Molly, out for a walk.

Sutherland is clearly a man who likes life to have a little edge, although you wouldn’t necessarily think so if you saw him today. Dressed in blue jeans with a dark blue blazer, white shirt and a tie, at 5ft 9in, he’s smaller than you would expect.

On screen, as Jack Bauer, the man who singlehandedly saves America from terrorists, Sutherland is a powerful presence, an actor at the top of his game. Off it, he’s softly spoken and polite. It’s hard to reconcile the reflective and conservatively dressed man before me with the hellraiser who has attracted plenty of tabloid headlines over the years. According to reports, he’s been in bar fights and jumped, fully clothed, into a pool at a swish hotel, knocked down the Christmas tree in the lobby of a London hotel (offering to pay for any damage first and thanking them afterwards) and mostly, the next morning, he’s woken with a sore head and an acute sense of embarrassment.

His love life has been eventful, too. There was the highly publicised romance with Julia Roberts in the early Nineties. Their wedding was called off at the last minute when Roberts, apparently angered by reports of him canoodling with a stripper (which he later denied), ran off to Europe with his then best friend, Jason Patric.

He’s been married twice – to actress Camelia Kath, the ­mother of his daughter, which lasted just a couple of years, and then to model Kelly Winn before that, too, ended in divorce.

These days, mostly he just works, spending ten months of the year filming 24 and, during his last break, making Mirrors. It’s relentless and a personal life of any kind must be difficult. “Yes, but if you take a look at my life, when I’ve had time off it’s not been very good, so for me it’s quite a healthy thing. I love to work.”

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