Every so often Jeremy Allen White’s two daughters look up at a billboard and ask: “Why did somebody make Dad’s face so large?” When Ezer, seven, and Dolores, four, were born the actor was barely known, but in 2022 he played the Chicago chef Carmy in the tense yet tender The Bear. Fame came fast. He won Golden Globes and Emmys, but that was just the amuse-bouche. Now, in the fame equivalent of gaining an extra Michelin star, at 34 years old White is busting out of the small screen and into Hollywood, to play Bruce Springsteen.
“Bruce wanted me to do it,” White says with a grin of the long-awaited biopic of the people’s rock star, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Going from The Bear to the Boss is a leap, but White succeeds by, with the best will in the world, not deviating much from what he does on The Bear.
“I said I didn’t know how to play guitar or sing. ‘Are you sure you want me?’” the actor says. “But he’d seen me on The Bear and believed, from that, that I could convey an inner life in silence…” We laugh. That description is at least half of what White does as Carmy, and in Deliver Me from Nowhere he simply swaps worrying about relationships and ravioli for relationships and riffs.
The film, backed by Springsteen and based on an acclaimed 2023 biography by the musician and writer Warren Zanes, is a biopic that zooms in on one pivotal moment — rather than showing the singer cradle to grave, it focuses on the recording of his beloved and anticommercial 1982 masterpiece, Nebraska. It was the album Springsteen made to hit pause on fame and is a suitable period for this nonconformist to pick for a film of his life. As one record label stooge says on hearing Nebraska: “So it’s like this the whole way through?” And it is — ten delicate, deeply personal and largely acoustic songs about blue-collar trauma and tricky fathers; if this is a jukebox musical, then it’s a really depressing one.
I meet White on a sun-dappled terrace in Los Angeles — he is relaxed and softly spoken, with a dry sense of humour and some Californian Zen. The first thing you spot are his eyes, so strikingly blue, matching his light denim shirt. He wears brown contact lenses for Springsteen but, other than that, with straggly hair and general insouciance, you can see why he was picked to follow Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury), Austin Butler (Elvis Presley) and Timothée Chalamet (Bob Dylan) to be the latest in the conveyor belt of Madame Tussaud’s-alike music movies. Of all of them, Deliver Me from Nowhere is the one most made for the fans, not to boost Spotify numbers.
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White was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1991, to Eloise and Richard, both working, rather than famous, actors, mostly in theatre. Other than a three-year stint in Baltimore when White was in primary school — “We lived in this suburb and they were not accepting of us; they treated us like aliens” — he went to acting school in his teens and lived in New York before moving to Los Angeles. He grew up on hip-hop, while at home his parents listened to hits from the 1960s and 1970s. And Springsteen? “I’ve been asking my folks this and they had this big blind spot in the 1980s so my knowledge of Bruce was Born to Run and Born in the USA.” So his favourite album was, essentially, The Best of Bruce? “Right, sure.”
He first met Springsteen in London last summer, before one of the Boss’s gigs at Wembley Stadium. They became close, with White even texting him after Donald Trump went off on one about the singer’s partisan comments at a show in Manchester; White calls it a “bizarre” rant. The Boss’s reply to White? “Thank you, but this is what I do.”
White as Springsteen in Deliver Me from Nowhere
20TH CENTURY STUDIOS
With Springsteen in September
KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES FOR 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS
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“I’ve seen people upset that Bruce spoke against Trump,” White adds. “But I would be curious if those people are still going to his concerts — I bet they are.” Because Hungry Heart still slaps no matter who you vote for? “Exactly.”
White observed the soundcheck at Wembley and hung out backstage. He watched the gig from the side of the stage with the singer’s wife, Patti Scialfa, and kept noticing Springsteen staring right at him. “He was giving a taste of the energy,” White says. “It is unnatural. When are humans ever faced with 90,000 souls coming at them? All I could think of were sporting events — and war.” Still, I say, he does at least cosplay being Springsteen in the film’s gig scenes? “Yes, but then somebody screams ‘Cut!’” he says. “And I realise that I am just an actor.”
Having seen how rabid the fans can be, is he worried about their reaction? “I had so much insecurity,” White says. “It’s really different to being an actor. Even if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio, there’s a relationship with a musician that is way more personal, so I was hesitant because I didn’t want to break hearts. I squirmed in fear but then realised I can’t please everyone. I’m just proud to represent Bruce.”
He sighs. He is glad that the filming of Deliver Me from Nowhere is over — because it took its toll. The Springsteen of the movie is alone and depressed; White grew up admiring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino so put himself through the wringer for the part. He does that for Carmy in The Bear as well.
White as Carmen in The Bear
FRANK OCKENFELS/FX
“I feel like I’m pain for hire,” White says with a shrug. “Like I’m getting paid to put myself in painful places. On The Bear it’s not like I walk around punching walls and screaming in my closet.” (Two things Carmy does.) “But I stay close to that energy and it’s uncomfortable — and filming the Bruce movie was incredibly difficult. I was in isolation. I was far from my children. I didn’t travel home much. It made me unwell and when I came out of it I thought, ‘There has to be a better way.’”
On screen and at home, though, White’s life has been relentless. Around the same time that The Bear launched, White split with and later divorced his wife, the actress Addison Timlin. Various sources cited “trust issues”, but they have joint custody of the children.
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“It depends how people gather information, I suppose,” he says, when I ask what he reckons the public make of him — messy on screen and complicated off it. “There have been periods in the last few years where there has been more scrutiny, or something going on in my personal life that has been of interest, and none of that is welcome. You want as much anonymity as possible.
“But I feel very lucky. I’ve been doing this since I was 15 and all things considered I’m all right and I get to do the thing that I love and if the trade-off is, on occasion, having somebody follow me around with a camera, that’s OK.”
He smiles. I have caught him during downtime. “And after a while,” he says, “people will stop following you once they realise that all you do is pick up your kids from school and come home. My life — my normal life — is very simple.
Springsteen on stage in 1984
RICHARD MCCAFFREY/ MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/ GETTY IMAGES
Perfoming at The Stone Pony, New Jersey in 1987
DEBRA L ROTHENBERG/GETTY IMAGES
“Like today. I made breakfast for my daughters, took them to school and later I will pick them up and make dinner.” Can he cook, though? I read he spent time at a cooking school before Carmy. “I can,” he says. “I have seven dinner dishes I do well, and three my children enjoy.” What dishes? He shakes his head. “You do the prep, then they take a bite and just ask for chicken nuggets.”
There is something of the impostor syndrome about White, a man who, I believe, thinks he still has something to prove. His career has been odd. In his mid-teens he starred in two films that went to the Venice and Cannes film festivals, and planned on a career of “a couple of plays and films a year, for which I’m second or third on the call sheet”. He basically wanted contentment and respectability like his parents, but in 2011 was offered a key part as Lip Gallagher on the US TV remake of Channel 4’s Shameless and, ten years and 134 episodes later, was still doing it.
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“Shameless ran for such a long time,” he says, shaking his head. “I was 18 when I started and 30 when we finished. That wasn’t my plan. I loved the first four seasons, but it just becomes difficult over that much time to still feel engaged with it. But when that finished I was driving home and had to pull over because I had a panic attack. I’d moved to LA alone at 18 and didn’t even know how to do laundry. I was a child who just wound up here and became reliant on that show — I was very afraid of what the future held.”
“I’m getting paid to put myself in painful places”
AUSTIN HARGRAVE
Did he think he would stay stuck in that soap opera? “I thought doing a TV show for 11 years would stop me having any career — let alone a film career.” But then Chris Storer, who created The Bear, asked him to be in another TV series. “That changed everything,” he says. Awards. Billboards. The Boss. He was even sent an email by Dustin Hoffman. “He could not believe I was not actually a chef from Chicago,” White says. “He thought he was watching a documentary.”
That brilliant show simmered through a superb first two series and a divisive third before hitting the boil again for a strong comeback this summer — a fifth arrives next year. Does White know how it ends?
“We are close to being finished,” he says. Do expand… “Well, forget the restaurant, The Bear really is about people reaching out for connection and learning how to communicate and I was told two years ago how it ends…” He smiles. “But we have stretched that a little,” he adds, as anyone who sat through series three will attest to. “So I’m not entirely certain?”
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in cinemas from Oct 24
