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As he tells it, Donald Sutherland was jet-lagged and bone-tired from the high- speed shooting schedule of HBO's "Citizen X" in Budapest when the call came from Dustin Hoffman in California: We need you.
"I came late, very late," he says, referring to the plea from the makers of "Outbreak" to join their cast as a general who would destroy a town in order to save the world from a hideous viral epidemic. "I gave Dustin every conceivable excuse, but he rebutted them all."
"Outbreak" was being made by Hoffman's production company, and apparently there was trouble wrestling down a script. Sutherland arrived to help create just the heavy they needed, not an unhinged Captain Queeg but a figure more terrifying for his icy rationality and an unblinking righteousness.
"We needed someone who could play a very special, complex character, not just a bad guy," said director Wolfgang Petersen. "We needed someone with intelligence and credibility, and a sense of humor. I've watched Sutherland for 25 years. He has an enormous presence on the screen. Dustin and I really wanted him, and as it turns out, he came with a lot of ideas of his own we wound up using."
The past couple of years have been interesting for Sutherland; his last four roles have formed a kind of parallelogram of characters in which each refers to the other, but from different angles. All are of an age and station. The steely contemptuousness of "Outbreak's" Gen. McClintock contrasts with the political suavity of "Citizen X's" Col. Fetisov, who must be careful not to wince at a powerful apparatchik's contention that "there are no serial killers in Russia. They are a product only of the decadent West."
His corporate honcho Garvin in "Disclosure" greets the day with Volpone-like glee, seeing gold in sunlight with a carnivore's pearly smile. His portrayal of Flanders Kittredge in "Six Degrees of Separation" is almost frightening in the nervous accuracy with which he captures a professionally charming, upscale New Yorker who lives through the eyes of other people. We don't know whether to laugh at his empty bonhomie or groan over his pathetic smugness. Or console his timorous humanity.
That we can't be sure is a tribute to Sutherland's skill...