Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong have both experienced a meteoric rise in stardom thanks to their time on two critically acclaimed TV series. But being the star of The Bear or Succession is nothing compared to walking around a film festival with a music icon like Bruce Springsteen.
At the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday, White, who plays Springsteen in the new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, and Strong, who plays Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, were joined by their real-life counterparts for a sold-out screening of the film. The screams were deafening when Springsteen came to the stage for the post-screening Q&A. Springsteen told the crowd he had finally signed off on a movie about his life because he considers it an “antibiopic” since it focuses closely on just two years of his life. “And I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do,” he added to laughs.
Deliver Me From Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, centers on the time when Springsteen was making his 1982 album Nebraska, while struggling with depression and challenging memories from his past. Springsteen and Landau worked closely with White and Strong as they prepared to play the characters, and were also present on set.
For White and Strong, recreating the steadfast friendship between these two was easy, but performing these characters in front of their real-life counterparts wasn’t. On the ground at Telluride, they spoke to Vanity Fair about Springsteen’s openness, relating to struggles with fame, and why Strong left Landau a voicemail as Landau.
Vanity Fair: What was it like the first time you met Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau?
Jeremy Allen White: We’d been in touch a little bit through text, and I had been preparing for a couple months before meeting him. But my first time meeting Bruce was at an empty Wembley [Stadium] in London. I went to soundcheck and got to watch him. After soundcheck, he saw me and called me over, and our first 20 minutes of talking were center stage at Wembley.
Were you nervous?
White: I was nervous, but I was with Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.
Wait, are they friends of yours?
White: No, I had had lunch at Emma’s house with another friend. Because of the generation that Emma and Pierce are from, I saw them react [to Bruce]. They’re such confident and charismatic people, and I saw them kind of get shy in his presence, which gave me, somehow, a little bit more confidence. So yes, I was nervous, but also, when you spend a little bit of time around Bruce, he’s so available and sort of generous and accommodating. It didn’t take long until there was a real ease in the conversation that happened pretty quickly.
Jeremy Strong: I was in Denmark last summer and drove a couple hours to where they were playing a show, and was sort of whisked into the complex of trailers and into a room with Bruce and Jon. And it’s interesting as an actor for me, before you’ve done the work and before you’ve entered into something, you’re totally outside of it. So I remember feeling like, I know somehow between now and X amount of months from now I’m going to be inside of this. But I met them before that was the case, so it was just kind of putting my toes in the water.
But it was a really profound experience. I’d never seen Bruce play before. Watching this ritual that he had with Jon before the show, which I subsequently learned is a ritual they have before every show—hundreds, maybe thousands of shows—where they sort of hold each other by his shoulders, kind of touch heads a bit of a benediction before Bruce goes out and plays the show. It gave me so much emotional information.
How did you come to understand the bond they have?
