How Bruce Springsteen tested Jeremy Allen White: ‘Do you think you can do what I can do?’

After an intimidating first encounter, the American actor had to overcome fear and self-doubt to complete Deliver Me from Nowhere

Jeremy Allen White plays Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Photo: 20th Century Studios

Jeremy Allen White signed up to play Bruce Springsteen the man. Springsteen made sure he understood the legend first.

Their first meeting for the biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere was at Wembley Stadium in London last year, during sound check before a sold-out show for 90,000 people. At 75, Springsteen was still prowling the stage with utter control. White stood in the wings, watching.

“I remember being so blown away and inspired, and also incredibly intimidated just by their sound check. Practice isn’t supposed to be full-on, but I don’t think they perform any other way,” White tells The National.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere review – can a good person make a great biopic?

Read More

When the show began, the noise was overwhelming. White was side-stage among Springsteen’s family and friends when the singer began to scan the crowd. “He would look over every once in a while, kind of looking through people. I thought, who is he looking for? Then he landed on me, made direct eye contact, and was performing to me only – with 90,000 eyes on him,” White says. “It was as if to say: this is just a taste of the energy that comes at me, the feeling I get when I do this. Do you think you can do what I do?”

White left the arena unsure. “It was intense, impressive. I’m blown away by that man. It was their last night on this European tour, and I think they performed for four hours.”

White had arrived hoping to better understand Springsteen. He left knowing he had to earn the right to play him.

White started with the guitar. He’d never played before.

“I remember sitting with Dave Cobb, our music supervisor, and his attitude was like, this shouldn’t be too tough, we’re gonna figure this out. I put the guitar in my hands, wrapped my fingers around the neck trying to make an E chord, and it was just so alien. It was impossible. My fingers did not want to behave,” says White.

“I saw Dave Cobb’s face just drop, and I thought maybe we’ve made a great mistake here because in six months' time, I had to hold it with the confidence of a man who looked like he was born with a guitar in his hand.”

White had never played the guitar before signing up for Springsteen's biopic. Photo: 20th Century Studios

He practised every day with guitarist JD Simo until the instrument stopped fighting back. “It was like anything you want to get good at – you just have to spend a lot of time on it, a lot of repetition and then pray.”

In time, the chords began to come together. The work had become muscle memory. What hadn’t clicked yet was who he was really playing.

That changed when Springsteen began to share what was happening in his life during the making of his 1982 album Nebraska – the same period Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere captures. It wasn’t the story of a rocker chasing success. It was about a man who had found it, and found it unfulfilling.

In 1982, after The River gave Springsteen his first top 10 single, he retreated to his bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and began recording on a four-track cassette deck. The songs that poured out were sparse and haunted – stories of killers, drifters and men running out of road. And in his characters’ trauma, Springsteen unlocked his own. Deliver Me from Nowhere is about that reckoning, when the performance stopped and the silence became unbearable.

That’s the space White had to inhabit.

“My job was to ask myself a very difficult question: what do I have in common with Bruce Springsteen?” he says. “That seems like an impossible question. But as I started to spend time with him, and he shared what was going on in his head during that time in his life, I realised: I am familiar with this doubt. I am familiar with this fear. I have been familiar with this deep sadness. And perhaps there is something I can give to this that has a place in the story.”

The film covers a dark period in the American singer's life, during which he made his most acclaimed album. Photo: 20th Century Studios

From there, things started to fall into place. At Nashville’s RCA, White spent a weekend recording songs from the album, over and over until he’d found Springsteen’s voice within his own. “I did find a lot of confidence in having that shared experience with Bruce and being able to sing his songs. I found my footing in there and felt close to Bruce for the first time,” he says.

The key, of course, was in the songs themselves. “When you're an actor and you're looking for a script to do, when the writing is very good and you go to perform it, it's very easy to perform with honesty. It's very easy to internalise and understand what's going on. Bruce is one of our best writers, like that. I think it would be more difficult to sing his songs with dishonesty.”

Before comedy-drama series The Bear quietly released on Hulu in 2022 – with little marketing and even less fanfare, only to become a global word-of-mouth phenomenon – White was just an everyday working actor.

Then, overnight, he became a leading man, a meme and a sex symbol. Caught in the spotlight, his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Addison Timlin, ended in 2023. He's found himself victim to tabloid gossip and scrutiny ever since. It’s a lot to handle, and it certainly gave him a way into Springsteen’s mentality in the wake of The River’s success.

“I thought a lot about public perception, and how confusing expectation can be and how confusing other people’s ideas of you can be if you don’t have a solid sense of self. It’s something I try to find in myself every day,” he says.

White shot to fame after his FX series The Bear released in 2022. Photo: 20th Century Studios

Even now, if there’s anything in Springsteen he doesn’t see, it’s how comfortable he is with 90,000 eyes on him.

“Every time I stepped on stage, I was scared as hell. And I think Bruce really holds that space,” he says.

But that’s the thing – Springsteen is scared too. As the musician told Esquire in 2018: “You’ve got to learn to live with the fear. You don’t overcome it – you learn to carry it.”

It’s what links them. Both men found themselves confronting who they are when the world started looking back. Both learnt that doubt and trauma don't fade once you succeed – you just learn to move with them.

That’s what Deliver Me from Nowhere is really about. Not fame, not reinvention, but the quieter work of living with yourself, and finding the courage to keep going.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in cinemas across the Middle East