‘When Did I Get That Handsome?’: Bruce Springsteen on Seeing Jeremy Allen White Play Him On Screen

Billed as a conversation with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the compact set at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the music icon came out separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, in the end, the creation of this record that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which sees White as Springsteen at a decisive juncture in the singer’s personal and professional journey. Much of the evening’s conversation, guided by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of transforming into the star, and the inevitable strangeness of art meeting life.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of cool composure – spoke of first spotting White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was dressed in white attire, so he was simple to notice,” he noted. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we greeted each other.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had studied countless recordings of concert material, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to explore some of the details of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected preparing himself for an interrogation that never arrived: “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 undertake, White said. He spoke frequently to the tremendous amount of Springsteen information available, the amount of study he had to absorb, and mentioned “the pressure I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of effort was going into the musical component 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 bonded with the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was adamant. White duly recorded his own renditions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and finding some confidence … connecting deeply to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. All the elements are right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can learn on,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so eager to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing 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 thoughts about the film were at first less complicated. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned 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 conventional musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it maybe became more unusual. Springsteen visited the set often, apologising to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really strange with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve mentioned this previously, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White gestures in disagreement and expresses denial.

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 tracked his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White portraying him, he was struck by the actor’s technique. “His performance was totally from the inside out, not just picking elements and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it greatly relates to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something akin to his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film forced him to return to hard phases 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 recounted how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

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

Springsteen recounted watching an early screening in the attendance of his sister, who held 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 parallel, possibly, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You create an utopian space for three hours,” he told the small crowd before him last night. “It’s not a fantasy world. It’s a very credible world. It has all the beautiful and awful parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of uplift that my audience takes with them. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”