Jeremy Allen White‘s performance in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is so convincing that it apparently even had Bruce Springsteen fooled at moments.
After a worldwide promotional tour, the biopic served as the opening film at AFI Fest in Hollywood on Wednesday, where co-star Marc Maron told The Hollywood Reporter that hearing White sing as Springsteen for the first time “was pretty amazing. I think he fooled Bruce too, from what I hear. Bruce couldn’t tell on a couple of songs whether it was him or Jeremy — seriously, I’m not making that up. Bruce said that, there you go. I definitely heard that on set, I’m not talking out of school there.”
Writer-director Scott Cooper also spoke about White’s impressive vocal performance, admitting that while he knew The Bear star could “play the intensity, the vulnerability; I knew that he had the blue collar physicality and the swagger that Bruce has” but wasn’t entirely sure about the singing.
“It wasn’t until we got to the RCA very historic recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee that Jeremy started to lay down Bruce’s lyrics that I thought, ‘My god, this is incredible,’” Cooper recalled. “I knew he had been enduring the kind of humbling process of becoming Bruce through vocal lessons and guitar lessons and harmonica lessons and movement lessons, but until you see it you have no idea. It was like I was struck by lightning and it was one of the great experiences of my film career.”
The film follows Springsteen as he records the album Nebraska in the early 1980s, while dealing with his newfound fame and ghosts of his past. Springsteen took the stage for a brief performance inside the TCL Chinese Theater following the screening, where he thanked the audience for “supporting our movie” and teased as the film is about to arrive in theaters, “this is my last night in the movie business, I’m sticking to music.”
The rock star also got political before singing “Land of Hope and Dreams,” saying, “I’ve spent 50 years traveling as kind of a musical ambassador for America and I’ve seen firsthand all the love and admiration that folks around the world have had for the America of our highest ideals. Despite how terribly damaging America has been recently, that country and those ideals remain worth fighting for. I want to send this out as a prayer for America, for our unity. No kings,” before launching into the song.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere hits theaters on Friday.
Tiffany Taylor contributed to this report.
