LOS ANGELES—Kiefer Sutherland has been working in the U.S. for so long that it’s easy to forget that his Canadian roots include a father who spent his days in China on the set of Bethune listening on the phone to every inning of games played by his beloved Montreal Expos. And there was his grandfather named the “greatest Canadian” in a CBC poll. You can’t get through an interview with Sutherland, however, without hearing the son of Donald Sutherland and the grandson of Tommy Douglas saying something that could only come from a Canadian.

On this day, in an L.A. hotel, it comes when the star of the hit series 24 is asked a question about the impact of the recent writers’ strike on television. “If you take a look at television as a medium, it has lost 40 percent of its viewership since the strike,” he says. “I was aware of the terrible ramifications for major-league baseball when it went on [its own] strike. And when the NHL went on strike, it was replaced by poker, and poker did better. Now you can’t find a hockey game on television [in the U.S.]. So I was terrified.”

In the animated film Monsters vs. Aliens, which is currently playing at theatres, Sutherland provides the voice for Gen. W. R. Monger, who has spent 50 years overseeing a prison that contains monsters. The group includes a 25-metre-tall woman (Reese Witherspoon), a gelatinous blob (Seth Rogen), a creature known as the Missing Link (Will Arnett), and a mad professor who accidentally turned himself into a cockroach (Hugh Laurie). Monger has been waiting for the day when he can put the prisoners to some use, and that day has apparently arrived: Earth is being invaded by aliens.

Sutherland says that he chooses movies because of the story and not the character he has been asked to play. He wanted to make this movie because it told a story that children could relate to: the idea that it’s okay to be different. He recalls that when he was in elementary school and living with his mother, the stage actor Shirley Douglas, he made a concerted effort to be accepted.

“As an actor, I have always been drawn to the entire story, and however I fit in, that was great, and this was no different. I loved the idea that we were gearing this to a younger audience. The main thing was this idea that you can tell children you can be different. I remember those moments when I was a kid growing up. I needed a backpack when I was young, but my mom had no money, so I got it a year after I had asked for it. But my mother was a product of the ’60s, and from the time I went to bed to the time I took it to school, my mother had designed it with fake rhinestones with my name in rhinestones and a peace sign and other shit. I had to bury that backpack every day on my way to school until I finally told her that someone stole it. So this desire to fit in is unrelenting for children. You have to tell them that they are all right no matter what anyone else is saying. The idea of being able to express that in a film really resonated with me.”

At 42, Sutherland has distanced himself from the kid who worried what his schoolmates would think of him. In fact, his 24 character, Jack Bauer, is easily one of the most independent-minded characters in recent television history. Sutherland says that it’s not an easy series to produce. Although it’s unlikely that many people were delighted with the writers’ strike, he admits that the show’s producers learned that their series could be better if they had more time to shoot it.

“As much as the writers’ strike was a difficult time for everyone, there were benefits for us. We had 15 months to shoot when we normally shoot in 10. It’s a three-act play for us, so each eighth episode kind of transitions into another story, and some of those transition points have been difficult for us because of the time we were afforded. We were at episode 15 or 16 and we just shut down. We realized that the show was better because of the extra time, so we are starting in May of this year instead of August. We will have finished 22 of the 24 episodes by the time we go to air, so at any given moment if we have to stop and figure things out, we have afforded ourselves that time. I don’t know why it took us seven years and a writers’ strike to figure that out, but we have.”