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

Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon walked on separately, but to the same clip of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, ultimately, the production of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, centered around the complex method of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – the whole time, a portrait of serene calm – mentioned first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already deeply immersed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered bracing 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 accept, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and discussed “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

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

For all the learning he engaged in, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White duly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, 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 absorbing Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right 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 finest guitar you can start 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 remembered stating on their first meeting. “We lack the time to learn the guitar,” Simo replied. “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 drawn to,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project gathered pace, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen appeared on location often, apologising to White each time he made an appearance. “It’s has to be really strange with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that attractive?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and signals dissent.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he understood that the actor was ready to represent the most thoughtful 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 playing him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was completely from the inside out, not just picking elements and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but somehow it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed 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 finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen recounted how often he saw 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 powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his volatile early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and drank heavily, and the vulnerability and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen recounted watching an early showing in the company of his sister, who clutched his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she remembered everything”. At the end, she faced him and said: “Isn’t it marvelous that we have that?”

There was an parallel, maybe, of the emotion 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 fictional universe. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”