How would '24' president advise 'Designated Survivor' POTUS?

Before Kiefer Sutherland ever took on the challenge of playing an American president in ABC's Designated Survivor (returning Wednesday at 10 ET/PT), the actor studied others.

You could even call him wonkish, but perhaps that's to be expected from the grandson of Tommy Douglas, a member of Canada's House of Commons who also was the architect of his country's universal health care program.

Because Survivor shoots in Toronto, the show gives Sutherland a chance to go back to the country he still considers home and whose citizenship he still holds. (Last fall, he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, "I've always felt I was Canadian and that's who I am and I have no interest in changing that.")

In an interview with Paste BN about Survivor's upcoming transition to stories about learning the presidency on the job and rebuilding the federal government, the conversation took a natural turn toward other POTUSes, both real and fictional.

What kind of advice might 24's first president, David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), whom Sutherland's character Jack Bauer spent years protecting, have for Survivor's president, Tom Kirkman?

"I guess, in one word, it would be, ‘Duck,' " he says, laughing.

That's some serious gallows humor: Palmer was the target of an assassination attempt and was ultimately killed by a sniper after he left office; Kirkman was in the crosshairs of another shooter in Survivor's winter finale on Dec. 14.

Actually, he believes Palmer would tell his character, "Keep your head down and keep trying to do the right thing."

He adds, “I have to believe that with anyone who has been president, there has to be a moment — regardless of ideology — where one puts their arm around the other and says, ‘Not so easy, eh?’  There’s a kind of understanding that that you walk on fire.  And there has to be respect from one president to another."

Even though he was busy protecting presidents on Fox's 24 for most of The West Wing's run, Sutherland still made time for Josiah "Jed" Bartlet (Martin Sheen).

"He was very, very smart and had a very specific view of what he felt right and wrong were," Sutherland says. " And he was flexible as a politician through the five or six years of the show that I watched. But if you pushed him too far, he became very entrenched and was willing to fight for what he believed in."

He praises West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin for writing the show in such a way that the president "was allowed to approach them with a great deal of common sense and in many cases, Jed Bartlet was put against special interests in Washington and he would fight against those. I think if you ask anybody, whether they’re a Republican or Democrat, they absolutely would like more of that in the political landscape than they might feel we have at present.”

That covers the TV presidents. How about the real ones?

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I thought, was an incredible president," he says. "There were aspects of the New Deal that didn’t work and he certainly did not navigate the country out of the Great Depression like a lot of people think he did. It was ultimately World War II that did that. But he approached things in an incredibly smart and intellectual way but it was balanced with humanity. He was an incredibly compassionate person and I think his own personal suffering and his illness added to his ability to do that."