“When did I become so handsome?” »: Bruce Springsteen on seeing Jeremy Allen White play him on screen | Springsteen: Deliver me from nowhere

Bset up as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White and promising “a special guest”, there was little surprise when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and rock star walked separately, but to the same entrance music video: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

After all, it’s the making of that record that forms the focal point of Scott Cooper’s new film, Deliver Me From Nowhere, in which White plays Springsteen at a critical juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, led by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex process of becoming Bruce and the inevitable peculiarity of the intersection of art and life.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of reptilian poise – spoke of his first sighting of White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was entirely white, so he was easy to spot,” he recalled. “I just waved him up on stage and we said hello.” White was already well steeped in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert footage and read a multitude of interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity to better understand Springsteen as a live performer and to discuss some specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembers bracing himself for an interrogation that didn’t happen: “I thought this guy was really going to be interested in Me …,” he said. In the end, though, “Jeremy was so prepared that he really asked very few questions.”

It was a daunting role to take on, White said. He repeatedly referred to the weight of information available about Springsteen, the amount of learning he had to undertake, and spoke of “the pressure I put on myself. Bruce called it ‘concentration’. I called it ‘anxiety that hardened, perhaps, by concentrating'”.

For all the learning he undertook, it was through the music itself that he truly connected with the role. “A lot of my energy was devoted to the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] “I wanted me to sing and play guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things… are you sure?’ ” “Cooper was adamant. 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 read a good script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you read Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same thing. It’s all there.

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 — the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White recalled of their first meeting. “We don’t have time to learn guitar,” Simo replied. “We have time to learn these five Bruce songs.”

Springsteen’s own feelings about the film were initially less complicated. “I thought I’m 76, I don’t really care what I do anymore,” 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 real blue-collar filmmaker” making “the kind of movie that would interest me,” he said. “This is not a standard musical biopic, but rather a character-driven musical drama.”

As the project grew, perhaps it became stranger. Springsteen often visited the set, apologizing to White every time he made an appearance. “It must be really weird with that guy’s stupid ass standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve said it before, but I kept thinking, ‘Damn, when did I become this good-looking?’ » » In the seat next to him, White wiggles his finger and shakes his head.

Springsteen had few doubts about White’s casting; he knew the actor was equipped to embody the most introspective period of his recording career. “I had watched The Bear and how the camera followed his inner life,” he said. “And if you see him in a movie, it’s a cliché, but he’s a rock star.”

When he first saw White play him, he was struck by the actor’s approach. “Her performance was totally from the inside out, not just picking out items and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It is a non-imitative performance, but somehow it is closely connected to my story and myself.” He saw it as something akin to his own approach to songwriting – writing about people whose lives differ so much from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

Even more disturbing, the film forced him to revisit difficult periods in his own life. The recreation of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey—a house he once described as “the biggest, saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen described how often he visited the house in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again…it was quite a miracle and quite wonderful.”

Likewise, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unstable early years, when he suffered from undiagnosed mental health problems and drank heavily, as well as the vulnerability and gentleness of his later years.

Springsteen described watching an early screening with his sister, who held his hand throughout. Barely a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At last she turned to him and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that we have this?”

There was perhaps an echo of the feeling that Springsteen hopes to give to his own audiences through his concerts. “You create an ideal world for three hours,” he told the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very believable world. It contains all the wonderful and terrible aspects of life… But I hope there’s an element of transcendence that my audience takes with them. And I hope that stays with them for as long as they need it.”