The pair sat down for a SiriusXM Town Hall
Bruce Springsteen and Jeremy Allen White sat down for a special Deliver Me From Nowhere town hall on SiriusXM’s E Street Radio hosted by Jim Rotolo.
During the interview, Bruce Springsteen revealed how he knew Jeremy Allen White was the right actor to step into his shoes and shared his reaction to how Nebraska performed on the charts. Jeremy Allen White also revealed which Bruce Springsteen song was hardest to record.
Springsteen said he watched White in The Bear.
“Well, I’d seen The Bear, so I knew the perimeters of Jeremy’s talents, you know, and I related to that character on The Bear very deeply myself, and I knew that this is the guy that could play the complexities of my own emotional state at that point in my life, you know, and that was the most important thing to me, that, I mean, I could see how, just from watching The Bear, how Jeremy worked in interior, you know,” Springsteen says.
White says he lost his voice performing as The Boss in the film.
“I mean, none of it was easy, but I’ll remember recording ‘Born in the USA for the rest of my life,'” White says. “That song put me on my. I lost my voice. I needed a nap and I saw Bruce shortly after that recording. It was about a week before we started shooting the film and Bruce had a documentary film, Road Diary that was out on Hulu, and so they had an event that was, you know, nearby and I saw Bruce after that, and I didn’t have any voice and he said, ‘What’d you do today?’ and I said, ‘I recorded Born in the USA,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right,’ and yeah. It was a funny thing. You know, we had about a week until we started shooting, and I lost my voice entirely. I just stopped speaking for a couple of days, and then my voice started to come back, and I loved the sound of it. I had this real ras,p and I was like, ‘Oh, man, how can I capture this or recapture this?’ And so there was a period in that first week, I don’t know if I ever told you this, Bruce, where I was waking up in the morning and I was screaming into a pillow to try and recapture like a little bit of that rasp, but I think my neighbors were getting nervous and I knew that I couldn’t go on that way. Maybe, you know, I wouldn’t be able to continue, so it was only about a week that I did that, but ‘Born in the USA.’ I mean, I don’t know how Bruce, you perform that song.”
White floored Springsteen with his acting preparation.
“Jeremy came so prepared because I had no idea of what kind of preparation he’d done, so I figured, ‘Oh man, he’s gonna ask me a thousand questions.’ You know, he asked me two,” Springsteen shares. “I barely remember them now, but there were just two, you know, and then his process is very quiet. It’s very private, you know, and so on set, you know, he was in the scene and then gone, and you know, I mean, of course once I was on the set a little bit and you could tell that he had completely prepared himself, but he had a very inner and very private process that worked real well.”
The full interview will air on SiriusXM’s E Street Radio (ch. 20) on Monday, October 20th at 10 am ET.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere will arrive in theaters from 20th Century Studios on October 24th and chronicles the making of Springsteen’s Nebraska, which will see an expansive reissue. Directed by Scott Cooper and adapted by Cooper from Warren Zanes’ Deliver Me From Nowhere, the film also stars Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s longtime manager and producer Jon Landau, alongside Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Paul Walter Hauser, Gaby Hoffman, Marc Maron, and David Krumholtz.
