(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 1 January 2026 16:45, UK
Hands up anyone who, first, thought that the recent Christmas movie Tinsel Town starring Kiefer Sutherland as a washed-up Hollywood star going into a UK pantomime would be good, or, second, had any idea that such a movie even existed? I’m going to take a wild guess and say the number of raised hands is less than ten.
Quite what possessed Sutherland to take the role on other than a considerable cheque from Sky TV is anyone’s guess, but it represented a bit of a nadir for someone who was so super cool as Jack Bauer in 24, which served as one of the original and best bingeable series along with shows like The Shield, and was also a proper heartthrob in some excellent movies like Stand by Me, Flatliners and A Few Good Men.
But who knows, maybe he was happy to swap a load of people shouting ‘he’s behind you’ for a paycheck, everyone has to eat after all and given Sutherland was born in London maybe he just fancied a trip home to the motherland, but you only needed to watch about 15 seconds of the trailer to know it wasn’t going to be It’s a Wonderful Life.
Back in the 1980s, though, Sutherland was an undoubted A-lister, and one of his most enjoyed films was the cult vampire flick The Lost Boys, a 1987 horror comedy featuring a selection of the then Brat Pack, including Corey Haim and Feldman, Jason Patric and Sutherland himself. It was a huge success, bringing in more than $30million on a budget of just $8m and inspired future hit shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
However, although it helped to make Sutherland a star, he doesn’t have quite as fond memories as you might imagine, mostly due to the look his lead vampire character had in a decade that tastes quite often forgotten. Sutherland told Movieweb, “(Director) Joel Schumacher wanted me to have white hair, and I had very long hair at the time, and he wanted me to keep it. I looked like a bad wrestler, I looked like a moron, it was awful.”
Adding, “I thought Billy Idol was really cool and looked really cool, and I still think he looks really cool. His hair was all spiky and kind of punk up top, so I got that haircut and left enough in the back so I could tell Joel Schumacher I left it long, and I think kind of accidentally might have been part of a movement that created one of the worst hairstyles of all time, the mullet.”
The mullet really was a hair trend that should have been consigned to history and left there, which makes it all the more disturbing that it has crept back into acceptability along with the scouse moustache, but there we are.
Films about provincial British productions of Jack and the Beanstalk aside, Sutherland has proved that he still knows how to make a great TV show over the last decade or so, with the Presidential thriller Designated Survivor, which was a hit on Netflix and then another White House drama, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gillian Anderson’s The White Lady for Showtime.
He also has a pretty exciting-sounding project coming up alongside Al Pacino in Father Joe, a Luc Besson-directed thriller in which a man of the cloth goes up against a powerful mob boss.
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