‘When Did I Get That Attractive?’: The Rock Legend on Watching Jeremy Allen White Play Him On Screen

Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star came out separately, but to the same clip of opening tune: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the making of this album that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which features White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of serene calm – recalled first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert footage, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a concert act, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing himself for an interrogation that failed to materialize: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so thoroughly briefed, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an intimidating role to undertake, White said. He mentioned often to the sheer weight of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of study he had to absorb, and mentioned “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he pursued, it was through the tunes that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my energy was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re studying a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. It’s all right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can practice with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn the guitar,” Simo responded. “We have time to learn these five Bruce songs.”

Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen on the set of Deliver Me From Nowhere in 2024.

Springsteen’s own feelings about the film were initially more straightforward. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I don’t really care what the fuck I do any more,” he said. “Yeah, go ahead. At my age you take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be intrigued by,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it maybe became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he enjoyed what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s selection; he knew that the actor was prepared to represent the most thoughtful time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s approach. “His performance was completely from the core personality, not just selecting traits and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-imitative performance, but in some way it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film compelled him to reexamine hard phases in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen explained how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he endured undiagnosed mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the fragility and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early showing in the presence of his sister, who grasped his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an reflection, perhaps, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an perfect realm for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very believable world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”