Kiefer Sutherland chats to Entertainmentwise about his new horror movie, Mirrors, "scaring the shit" out of his twin sister, and what we can expect from the new series of 24.

What first brought you to Mirrors?
Alex (Aja, director of Mirrors) did something with The Hills Have Eyes that I haven’t seen in a long time, which reminded me of The Omen. Even though the characters in The Hills Have Eyes weren’t as developed as I think the characters in Mirrors are, he still managed to weave a concern for the child, a concern for the family. It gave me a strong enough basis in which to identify with the characters on a much more personal level so that when they were in danger, when their lives were threatened, it moved me. That’s what Mirrors did – it’s genuinely scary but you have concern for the family, too.

You’ve said you find it hard to watch films like this…
Yeah but the making of one is different and it’s fun. It’s the ability to know you are stringing someone along to this big jump. From the time when I was 5 I loved to hide behind the chair and scare the shit out of my twin sister – so the desire to do it has no correlation to my ability to watch it.

After the huge success of 24, you’ve become synonymous with your character in the show. How do you feel about playing Jack Bauer seven years on?
One of the great fears that I had is you sign a contract, it used to be minimum of five years and then it became a minimum of 7. You start thinking ‘OK, I’m 33 years old and I won’t be finished with this until I’m 40’. So I’m sitting there thinking, ‘what’s it going to be like to have to play the same character over that long a period of time?’ It wasn’t until the second or third year that I thought to myself ‘what an arrogant thing to say, “oh to play the same character..” Because it’s not the same character – every year informs the next year. When I first started playing him he had a wife and a daughter, by the time I started playing him the next year, the character had changed, just like a human being changes over time.

What can we expect from the show in the future?
We’re filming at the moment. Because of the writer’s strike we will finish the entire season by November. It will be the first time in our history that we will have finished all 24 episodes before we show one, which is fantastic. Disappointing as the writer’s strike was, not least for an audience – and for everybody who works in this business on both sides, a strike is a hard thing to go through – it allowed us to make what I believe is the best season of 24 we’ve ever made, which I’m very excited about.
 
What was the thinking behind your record label, Ironworks?
We were watching really great artists being overlooked by big labels. We saw the whole business changing and realised that the business model was at fault, not the music. Companies got so bloated and so big that if an artist didn’t sell a million records it wasn’t worth their time. We can sell a 120,000 records and that artist is buying a house. There’s absolutely no reason that you can’t make it on that small level again.

Mirrors is out on the 10th October.