One, two, three, four! With just a few weeks left until Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere hits theaters and the world can Jeremy Allen White take on his most challenging movie role yet, the actor is reflecting on what it was like to get into character, channeling not just a legend but one at a crossroads in his life and career.
Jeremy Allen White recently met up with CBS, where he went on a journey back into what it meant to play Bruce Springsteen. “If you’re gonna do one thing to get it right, you have to perform to the point of exhaustion. ‘Cause he continues until he cannot go any longer.” Bruce Springsteen’s concerts are notoriously long, even with the bulk of the band in their 70s. I was fortunate enough to have been at his longest US show ever: four hours and two minutes! He added, “Everybody’s got their own idea of Bruce Springsteen. And I think at the beginning, I was approaching it like, how am I going to make everybody happy? That’s a fool’s errand. It’s an impossibility.”
Bruce Springsteen would make it a priority to be on the set of Deliver Me from Nowhere whenever possible and whenever director Scott Cooper would allow. A number of nights were spent at the Stone Pony, the New Jersey venue where Springsteen frequently played. “Bruce was there, like he was a lot of days, and he came out, and he kind of introduced me to the audience, so he gave them to me all warmed up. They made me feel like a star for three-and-a-half minutes. And then the first A.D. would say ‘Cut,’ and they would go silent. And I remembered, I am not Bruce Springsteen, I am just an actor.”
And that actor is very likely going to earn his first Oscar nomination, as White picked up a lot of momentum in the race out of film’s debut at Telluride. It’s one of the more exciting competitions as of late, and it looks as if Jeremy Strong — who plays Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau — will land his own nomination in the supporting category.
You can purchase tickets for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere now, with the movie set for October 24th.
