Picking up a Critics Choice award for his role in HBO limited series The Undoing on Sunday night, Donald Sutherland said he seriously thought he was the killer for almost the entire shoot.
“The truth is we didn’t know,” he said during a Zoom chat with the press after his win. “I always suspected that it was me. And maybe it was me.”
In the David E. Kelley-created The Undoing, Sutherland plays the wealthy father of Nicole Kidman’s character, who is grappling with her husband (Hugh Grant) being accused of murder.
And Sutherland was being sincere in his suspicions, because, he explained, no one in the cast knew the killer’s identity until they shot that episode. “We didn’t get the 6th [finale episode] script until just before we shot it. Seriously. And then when I knew, the relief that it wasn’t me was so great that I didn’t want to say anything. Except that I’ve just said something.”
Asked how he has kept a mindset that brought him a steady stream of success, he laughed and said, “I can only say—it sounds awful and really pretentious—but it’s always been the pursuit of truthfulness, the truthfulness of the character, and the joy of discovering that, that’s been the great happiness of my life. The character in this was so beautifully written and directed. And to play with Nicole. I’ve been her father a couple of times and I just love it and Hugh was fantastic. And I had a lot of pleasure doing that and I had a lot of pleasure saying David E. Kelley’s lines.”
