‘When Did I Get That Handsome?’: The Rock Legend on Watching Jeremy Allen White Play Him In Film

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

It is, in the end, the making of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, centered around the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of serene calm – mentioned first spotting White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was easy to spot,” he noted. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert footage, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing himself for an inquiry that never arrived: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so prepared, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an daunting part to undertake, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information available, the amount of study he had to absorb, and mentioned “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘anxiety that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the sonic element of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he engaged in, it was through the songs that he really bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White duly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, 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 examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the nearest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can practice with,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We lack the time to learn the guitar,” Simo answered. “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 at first more straightforward. “I reasoned 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 accept greater hazards, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a real blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and signals dissent.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was equipped to portray the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a well-known phrase, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White playing him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the inside out, not just picking elements and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film pushed him to return to difficult periods in his own life. The reconstruction of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen explained how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very emotional thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – portraying his turbulent early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and tenderness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the attendance of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an echo, maybe, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very credible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of uplift that my audience brings home. And ideally it stays with them for as long as they need it.”