🎧 Jeremy Allen White ‘Went Crazy’ to Play Bruce Springsteen. It Paid Off
The actor, a freshly minted Golden Globe nominee, on playing The Boss and why sometimes it’s good to meet your heroes
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When Jeremy Allen White was offered the role of Bruce Springsteen in the film Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, he asked for a week to consider it. The Emmy-winning star of The Bear already knew that he had a rapport with the director, Scott Cooper, and a fondness for both Springsteen and the album Nebraska, the emotional collection of songs the rock star wrote during the period covered by the film. White also knew that to prepare, he would have access not only to Springsteen himself (as the iconic star was heavily involved in the production), but also to extensive archival material, interviews with Springsteen’s bandmates and pretty much anything else he could ask for as an actor.
So when White joined me for this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, I asked him how he could face that gargantuan task and the mountain of research ahead of him without going crazy. His response was quick: “No, I definitely went crazy.”
It’s rare to talk to actors who are so open not just about the amount of preparation that went into a role — you can hear plenty of that anywhere — but the uncertainty that’s baked into it. As White, 34, dove into old Springsteen interviews and videos of his performances and the start of production came closer, he told me, “I was just trying to figure out — do I need to hang on to this stuff? Do I need to start making a chart, or can I just trust that this is seeping in the way that I want it to?”
He also faced the opposite of the problem people mean when they tell you never to meet your heroes. “Getting to know Bruce and spending time with him, my admiration for him grew and grew and grew. This figure that already loomed very large just kept getting larger. I started questioning my ability to sort of show up and do him justice.”
In the end, the work paid off. Though Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has been a bit quiet at the box office, praise for White’s performance has been more or less unanimous; just yesterday, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actor in a drama. In our pod conversation, White talks not just about his work as Bruce Springsteen, but how nearly half a lifetime on screen — he started his career on Showtime’s Shameless when he was just 19, before he found breakout success with The Bear — taught him what the camera can and cannot capture.
Hear it all on today’s episode of the podcast, which also includes the conversation my colleague Christopher Rosen and I had immediately after the Golden Globe nominations were announced yesterday, digging into everything from the shocking Wicked snub to some surprising TV successes.
