Jones plays U.S. President Allison Taylor on this season’s 24.

TPN / SPENCER WEINER

LOS ANGELES — Americans were looking for a president who could inspire hope, and so were the producers of Fox’s 24.

The last season’s leaders ran amok, and the show’s writers wanted to shake things up with someone who could stand up to Jack Bauer.

Fortunately for them, stage veteran Cherry Jones, 52, known for her Tony Award-winning performance as a stalwart nun in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, was available.

“Any time someone offers a middle-aged actress the part of the president on a beautifully produced show, you’re going to say yes. It’s irresistible,” said the husky voiced Jones.

Even if Madame President will inevitably need to lean on Bauer?

“Well, I like underdogs who are up against it. I love playing decent people put in impossible situations, wrestling with their souls,” she said.

As President Allison Taylor, Jones will have more than her soul to wrestle with in the Fox show. From the outset, it seems the odds are stacked against her character.

A military intervention to prevent genocide abroad morphs into a national-security situation — one whose resolution would typically fall to ace operative Bauer. But CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) has been disbanded, and its onetime hero is standing trial for his unorthodox, often ultra-violent methods of protecting the country.

Meanwhile, the new president must deal with a personal crisis as well. Her son is dead, an apparent suicide, but the tragic event has sent her husband on a mad chase to find a possible murderer.

The show returned as something of an underdog. Coming off a year-and-a-half absence — and a sixth season criticized as punchless — the show’s creative forces are eager to demonstrate the former Emmy Award winner is back on track.

Jones as their female commander in chief instantly energizes the program, said the producers, by allowing them to explore gender role reversal, establish a formidable foil to Bauer, and anchor the show with a sturdy actress.

“You believed her immediately as president,” said executive producer Evan Katz.

Just days from shooting the show’s final episode, Jones, a Tennessee native, conceded that it was strange to move from theater where the beginning, middle and end to every story is known to “putting yourself in the hands of the writers and the great unknown.”

“After seven seasons, I imagine that the writers’ jobs are getting harder and harder,” Jones said, in her Hollywood Hills apartment. “But you know, I’m a very slow reader, and every script I got I flew through. It was like reading this great espionage thriller that I was actually going to get to act out.”

Her initiation as a series regular to 24 was bumpy — she had to endure the writers strike, which began in late 2007 and lasted three months. When Hollywood shut down, the layoff prompted the producers to rethink story lines — Season 7’s initial premise was scrapped and turned into November’s two-hour movie 24: Redemption.

Despite the turmoil, Jones said she was reassured when producers told her the new president would be modeled after David Palmer (the second-season president played by Dennis Haysbert): a noble leader faced with dire circumstances and a ticking clock.

She knows that kind of character. For two years, she played the strong-willed nun in Shanley’s Doubt, in which her character believes a priest has had an inappropriate relationship with an altar boy.

Shanley said Jones attacked the part of the nun like “a very forceful plow, going further and further. She finds that something, and she never lets go.”