‘When Did I Get That Handsome?’: The Rock Legend on Seeing The Actor Play Him On Screen

Billed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star walked on separately, but to the matching segment of opening tune: the initial lyrics 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 decisive juncture in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, steered by Edith Bowman, revolved around the detailed approach of becoming Bruce, and the inescapable oddity of performance blending with truth.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of cool composure – spoke of first catching a glimpse of White during a rehearsal at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was wearing all white, so he was readily visible,” he remembered. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we exchanged hellos.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert videos, and perused many interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a enhanced comprehension of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered steeling 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 prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an intimidating role to take on, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of preparation he had to absorb, and discussed “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that set, 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 research he undertook, it was through the tunes that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical side 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 promptly recorded his own renditions 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 going through 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 learn on,” White says. He started guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist 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 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 thoughts about the film were initially less complicated. “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 take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be drawn to,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a character-driven drama with music.”

As the project moved forward, it possibly became stranger. Springsteen came to the filming location often, apologising to White each time he arrived. “It’s has to be really weird with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he appreciated 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 wags his finger and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he knew that the actor was ready to represent the most introspective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked 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 playing him, he was affected by the actor’s technique. “His performance was completely from the core personality, not just choosing characteristics and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but nevertheless it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own method to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to discover the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film pushed him to reexamine challenging times in his own life. The reconstruction 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 described how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and very beautiful.”

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

Springsteen told of watching an early showing 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 faced him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an parallel, maybe, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very credible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of elevation that my audience carries away. And with luck it stays with them for as long as they need it.”