What Kiefer Sutherland did next

Kiefer Sutherland wasn’t looking for another television role. And after 192 episodes of assiduously saving the world as FBI agent Jack Bauer in 24, who could blame him? But then the script for Touch arrived. “By the time I got to page 35, I thought, 'S---, I’m in real trouble here,’” he says. “This wasn’t something that I wanted to just sit and watch at home. It was something I would regret not taking part in.” The drama, which begins on Sky1 later this month, sees Sutherland playing Martin Bohm, a man whose wife dies in the attack on the Twin Towers, prompting him to leave his job to care for his 11-year-old son Jake (David Mazouz). Jake is seemingly mute, and cannot bear to be touched, even by his own father. He is diagnosed as autistic, but is in fact, the series posits, a more evolved sort of human, with the ability to find hidden numerical patterns that link people across the globe. Touch’s sensitive and emotional depiction of the relationship between a father and son who themselves struggle to connect may surprise those who tune in expecting to find Sutherland in action-hero mode. But, for the actor, the surprise was being offered a television series of this quality quite so soon. “Most people, knowing that I had just come off eight years of 24, didn’t send me any television scripts, because they assumed – and they were correct – that I was not going to rush back into that sort of commitment,” he says.