In Paramount+’s new eight-episode thriller, Rabbit Hole, Lost Boys star and lead of the Fox hit series 24, Kiefer Sutherland, plays John Weir an expert in corporate espionage who runs afoul with some very powerful people. Ahead of the series premiere on March 26, Sutherland spoke with Collider’s Steve Weintraub on what it is about this role that’s something he’s wanted to do since he started his career and how he relates to the character of John Weir.

From the screenwriters behind Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris, showrunners Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Rabbit Hole, follows John Weir (Sutherland), an expert in manipulation, who deals specifically in corporate espionage and aiding companies in muddying the reputations of their competitors. When the target of one of Weir’s gigs winds up murdered, he finds himself at the center of a struggle to preserve democracy, and mysterious, string-pulling powers frame him for the crime. In the fight for his innocence, Weir must take on an invisible enemy that is, essentially, everywhere.
COLLIDER VIDEO OF THE DAYSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
During his interview, Sutherland shares which ‘70s-era thrillers influenced Ficarra and Requa when writing Rabbit Hole and which aspect of Weir “…caught [him] out of the gate,” and convinced him to get involved. He reflects on today’s “technological revolution,” how topical the series is, and reveals how much he knew about his character arc going into filming… and how much he didn’t! For all of this and Sutherland’s take on the phenomenon that is The Lost Boys, check out the interview in the player above, or read the full conversation below.

COLLIDER: I’ve been a fan of yours for a very long time, it is great to talk to you. I would imagine that no matter where you go, people want to come up to you and talk to you because it’s you. What do you find that people always want to ask you about? Is there one particular role, or does it depend where you are?

KIEFER SUTHERLAND: It’s funny, first of all – and this is really interesting just about people in general – they usually don’t ask a question, they’ll tell you something, which is very funny, right? Because I can’t imagine that I’m any different. But, first of all, people have been incredibly kind to me over the years and really supportive, and, you know, my life has gone up and down, my career has gone up and down, but people have been really cool with me, and I’m grateful for that.

I would have to say, probably more than not, someone will tell me, and it doesn’t matter their age, but they’ll tell me that they had a relationship with Lost Boys that was really special. So if it’s an older person, they’ll tell me that they saw it when they [were] my age when we made it, like they saw it for the first time when they were like 18, 19 years old. For the younger people, they’ll tell me that their dad or their granddad showed it to them. And it’s very sweet that that kind of film, for whatever reason, I couldn’t explain it to you, but the fact that that people are handing it down from generation to generation speaks volumes to me, and I was just so proud to be a part of it for that reason alone, that it meant that to those people.

Jumping into why I get to talk to you, I’m imagining that you get offered scripts. What was it about this material that said, “Oh, I need to do this.”?

SUTHERLAND: Well, first of all, I’m a huge fan of John and Glenn, as writers and directors, separately and then ultimately together. They said, “Well, we’ve got this idea…” and it was a really loose kind of conversation. We were gonna kind of hearken back to these thrillers from the ‘70s, like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View and Marathon Man. Now, these are all the films that I grew up on and that I have such fond memories of, and that, when I started my career, I really wanted to get to do those films, those kinds of movies that I watched.

Then they got to describing the character, and the thing about the character that caught me out of the gate that I found really interesting and thought, “Okay, I know where to start,” was that this guy is a predator on some level. He was the hunter. He was the one who was setting up other companies, and using misinformation to kind of make them believe something else was happening, and he took that and turned it into a profit for the company that had hired him. Then, within minutes, just like he was working a scam on someone else, someone got him and he goes, literally in the first episode, 180° and goes from hunter to hunted, and goes from strong to vulnerable. And any time you get to watch a character make that kind of an about-face turn, and you see them emotionally vulnerable and weak, there’s an identifiable quality to that, that I just think is interesting to watch and I think very identifiable.

I can’t tell you that I’ve gotten through a single day in my life that I haven’t done that whole 180° turn, you know? I’ll get out of my car and I feel really confident going into the grocery market, and then something happens in aisle six, and I’m like, “Well, I don’t feel as confident anymore.” And, of course, it’s on a much smaller level, but I think it’s happening to us all the time. When they wrote something that laid it out that precisely, I was like, “Yeah, I know how to start here and get to this other part.”

Then I think that we’ll have a character that people are gonna identify with him and ultimately root for because he doesn’t start off clean, he’s doing some bad stuff, too, and yet once it turned on him, I really felt for him. And then I also felt that, just over the course of the season, that he was learning stuff about himself, too, that would become very relatable as well.

Image via Paramount+

I feel like stuff being depicted on the show could absolutely be happening in real life. So, do you think what you’re showing on the show is being done by corporations and people the way it’s being depicted on the show?

SUTHERLAND: I would think probably on a much more sophisticated level, yes. Yeah. I mean, we run a scam on a guy that’s pretty pedantic, and actually almost comical because of what we do. I don’t want to ruin what the scam is, but I think on a much more sophisticated level, yes, I think companies are doing it to other companies. I think countries are doing it to other countries.

Look, it took us decades to adapt to the Industrial Revolution, and I think we still are, and it’s going to take us decades to adapt to the ramifications and realities of the technological revolution that we’re still in the middle of. And so, I guarantee you when I see on CNN this profile about AI voice-matching, and that with a computer and a few words of Leonardo Dicaprio’s voice I can make a whole script and it’ll sound like him… Well, if I’m seeing that on CNN, I promise you, I’m the last guy to know and that technology has been around for a while. And it’s been used, and I think sometimes fun for a joke, and I think probably sometimes not so fun.

Yeah, I just think about what it’s going to be in five and 10 years, which is really scary.

SUTHERLAND: Well, yeah, and it is scary, you know, but I do have faith. I actually might be one of the last people that has faith in people, and I think that we’ll bump into some things, and we’ll go, “Okay, we’re gonna have to work on that and we’re gonna have to…” and I think we, as a society, have to just kind of try our hardest to do the better and the good thing. It doesn’t mean that that’s gonna be easy and smooth sailing, and that it’s not going to require a fight, but yeah, it’s a very tricky world to navigate right now, and I think our show, for better and for worse, kind of represents that.

Image via Paramount+

I’ve seen four of the eight episodes, and the audience, they’re always on their toes because they’re not sure who’s on what side. What was it like for you? Did they tell you the whole arc of everything before you started filming, or how much were you reading it script by script and wondering, “I don’t know if this character is going to be on my side or not.”?

SUTHERLAND: I got four up front. We talked in loose terms about the overall arc, and this is something that I really did experience on 24. Howard Gordon on 24, we would get together, go out for a couple of beers, and he’d lay out his idea for the whole season, and we’d talk, and he’d add a couple of things, “What if we tried this?” But, we’d walk away from that dinner thinking we had the beginning, the middle, and the end, right? And I can almost say to a T, every year, that end note was about Episode 14 [laughs]. And it would change, right? It would change based on what we were actually doing. So, it was fluid and exciting because certain scenes you would do and be like, “That’s good. We gotta lean into that. We got to write more towards this conflict or that situation.” So I wanted that same freedom for John and Glenn to have on this, and they took it. So the last couple episodes, yeah, there was stuff that I wasn’t expecting, and I had to adapt to, and that’s what makes it exciting.

Rabbit Hole premieres on March 26, only on Paramount+.