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Billed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and promising “a special guest”, there was hardly any shock when Bruce Springsteen showed up on the small stage at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The actor and the rock star came out separately, but to the identical excerpt of entrance music: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the production of this LP that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s talk, guided by Edith Bowman, centered around the intricate process of embodying Springsteen, and the unavoidable peculiarity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – throughout, a image of cool composure – recalled first catching a glimpse of White during a sound check at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he remembered. “I just beckoned him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert videos, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an opportunity for a greater understanding of Springsteen as a onstage artist, and to discuss some of the particulars of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen reflected bracing himself for an interrogation that never arrived: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so thoroughly briefed, he really asked very few questions.”

It was an intimidating role to accept, White said. He spoke frequently to the immense volume of Springsteen information out there, the amount of learning he had to take on, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that hardened, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the sonic element of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the study he undertook, it was through the songs that he really related to the part. “A lot of my attention was going into the audio dimension of the film,” he said. “[Scott] expected me to perform and strum the guitar, and I said, ‘I can’t do those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was firm. White accordingly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the booth, singing Nebraska, and gaining assurance … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is quite simple,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also sent White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the best guitar you can practice with,” White says. He began guitar lessons, via Zoom, with touring guitarist JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White recalled saying on their first meeting. “We don’t have 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 sentiments about the film were at first less complicated. “I thought I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned what the fuck I do any more,” he said. “Yeah, go ahead. At my age you accept greater hazards, 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 drawn to,” he said. “Not your typical musical biopic, but more of a individual-centered narrative with music.”

As the project progressed, it perhaps became stranger. Springsteen appeared on location often, expressing regret to White each time he arrived. “It’s gotta be really odd with the guy’s silly presence standing there,” he said. But he liked what he saw: “I’ve said this before, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that handsome?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and shakes his head.

Springsteen had minimal hesitation about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was prepared to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera tracked his inner world,” 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 inner self outward, not just choosing characteristics and applying them externally,” he said. “It’s a non-copycat performance, but nevertheless it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He saw it as something like his own way to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives are very different from his own. “You have to locate the part of them that is part of you.”

More unsettling was the way the film compelled him to revisit difficult periods in his own life. The rebuilding of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the best and most sorrowful sanctuary I’ve ever known” was strange; Springsteen described how often he visited the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his turbulent early years, when he suffered undiagnosed mental health issues and consumed alcohol excessively, and the sensitivity and sweetness of his later years.

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

There was an echo, perhaps, of the emotion Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You build an perfect realm for three hours,” he addressed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very believable world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But ideally there’s an element of elevation that my audience takes with them. And with luck it lingers in their minds for as long as they need it.”