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Marketed as a discussion with Jeremy Allen White, and hinting at “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen arrived on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star came out separately, but to the matching segment of introductory track: the opening lines of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the creation of this album that provides the focus for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a critical moment in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, moderated by Edith Bowman, focused on the detailed approach of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – the whole time, a image of serene calm – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was readily visible,” he noted. “I just casually gestured him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had watched hours of concert material, and consumed numerous interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an chance for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a live performer, and to talk over some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen recalled steeling himself for an inquiry that did not come: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so prepared, he really asked hardly any queries.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He referred repeatedly to the immense volume of Springsteen information accessible, the amount of preparation he had to take on, and discussed “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘worry that set, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of energy was going into the music aspect of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the learning he pursued, it was through the music itself that he really related to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical side of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to sing and play the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White promptly recorded his own interpretations of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the vocal chamber, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … relating strongly to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re going through a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re examining Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also presented White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the closest he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the nicest guitar you can start with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with professional musician JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so excited to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We lack the time to learn the guitar,” Simo responded. “We have time to learn these five Bruce songs.”

Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen on the set of Deliver Me From Nowhere in 2024.

Springsteen’s own feelings about the film were at first less complicated. “I figured I’m 76 years old, I have few worries what the fuck I do any more,” he said. “Yeah, go ahead. At my age you embrace more chances, in your work and in your life in general.” It benefited that Cooper was “a genuine blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your standard musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “It’s has to be really weird with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White wags his finger and expresses denial.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s casting; he knew that the actor was equipped to portray the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his internal life,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a cliche, but he’s a stage legend.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was struck by the actor’s method. “His performance was entirely from the core personality, not just selecting traits and wearing them like clothes,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but nevertheless it deeply corresponds to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something akin to his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives vary significantly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disturbing was the way the film forced him to revisit difficult periods in his own life. The recreation of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the finest and most tragic sanctuary I’ve ever known” was uncanny; Springsteen recounted how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was truly wondrous, and quite wonderful.”

Similarly, it was “a very impactful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – capturing his unpredictable early years, when he endured unrecognized mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the sensitivity and sweetness of his later years.

Springsteen shared watching an early screening in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she recalled all details”. At the end, she turned to him and said: “Isn’t it amazing that we have that?”

There was an parallel, maybe, of the feeling Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an ideal world for three hours,” he told the select group before him last night. “It’s not a imaginary place. It’s a very credible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But with luck there’s an element of uplift that my audience takes with them. And with luck it stays with them for as long as they need it.”