‘When Did I Get That Good-Looking?’: Bruce Springsteen on Seeing Jeremy Allen White Play Him In Film

Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was scarcely any astonishment when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the music icon walked on separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the starting verses 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 critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s exchange, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inevitable strangeness of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a picture of cool composure – mentioned first spotting White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert material, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled bracing himself for an questioning that did not come: “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 challenging character to accept, White said. He spoke frequently to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to take on, and discussed “the stress I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

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

For all the study he pursued, it was through the songs that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] wanted me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White duly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying 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 thoughts about the film were originally simpler. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I have few worries 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 helped that Cooper was “a true 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 possibly became odder. Springsteen came to the filming location often, apologising to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really weird with the guy’s silly presence 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 handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was equipped to represent 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 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 entirely from the inner self outward, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but somehow it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He considered it something akin to his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film forced him to reexamine difficult periods in his own life. The recreation of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was quite a miracle, and extremely moving.”

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

Springsteen recounted watching an early viewing in the company of his sister, who clutched 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, possibly, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an ideal world for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It has all the joyful and painful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And hopefully it stays with them for as long as they need it.”