Legacy’: Kiefer Sutherland Shoots Down Jack Bauer Return On Fox Reboot

1CK1S · August 2016

While signature Fox drama series 24 will be coming back this coming season with offshoot 24: Legacy, its signature character Jack Bauer won’t. Kiefer Sutherland, who won an Emmy for playing the intrepid CTU agent in the original series, is now the star of the new ABC drama series Designated Survivor. Asked by Deadline if there is a chance for him to reprise his role on 24: Legacy, Sutherland was firm.

“There are absolutely no plans for that,” he said at the ABC TCA party on Thursday. Sutherland continues to serve as an executive producer on the 24 spinoff, which features all-new characters led by a new hero, played by Corey Hawkins.

24 and 24: Legacy executive producer Howard Gordon got Jack Bauer fans’ hopes up at the ATX TV Festival in Austin where he said, “I sure would love to see (Sutherland) at some point on the show, and I don’t think he’s ruled it out, either.”

Gordon later clarified to Deadline that “there’s no plans at the moment; I think it’s just sort of a possibility downstream reflecting just my own personal fantasy. We haven’t said you’re definitely coming back; it’s just something that I was just musing about and that I think isn’t impossible but there are no plans about it.”

At the ABC party, Sutherland also said that he’d watched the political conventions. He felt that his character on Designated Survivor — a low-level cabinet member who suddenly becomes the US President after the Capitol is destroyed during the State of the Union — could relate to First Lady Michelle Obama whose DNC speech Sutherland praised.

Like Michelle Obama, Sutherland’s character was not a political operative when he entered the White House, Sutherland said. “The way she talked about putting her daughters in the SUV on the way to school was very human, that’s how this guy goes into office as well,” he said. “But Michelle had watched Barack Obama’s star rise, she had time to adjust, she’d had a two-year Presidential campaign to get used to the idea. My wife, played by Natascha McElhone, had about 35 minutes.”