Kiefer Sutherland: Playing It Cool, One Very Long Day at a Time

You can take the actor out of the movies, but you can't take the movies out of the actor. So when I ask Kiefer Sutherland how long his TV drama, 24, can keep its edge, he reaches to the pictures for an analogy. "I thought Die Hard worked, and I thought Die Hard 2 worked," he says carefully. "And I think they should have stopped it there."

Sutherland's worries are a reflection of the high bar the show set last year. It chronicled "the longest day" in the life of counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer (Sutherland)--24 hours in which he had to...