Bruce Springsteen’s Manager Jon Landau Says Jeremy Allen White Is “Perfect” Choice to Play The Boss in Upcoming Biopic
Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau is giving his thoughts on the upcoming biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, which follows The Boss while making his hit 1982 album Nebraska.
Jeremy Allen White is set to play Springsteen in the film, with Landau being portrayed by Jeremy Strong. The project will be based on the 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes.
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“Oh my god, he’s just perfect. The casting is great,” Landau told The Hollywood Reporter of White playing the superstar. “[Director] Scott [Cooper] said to me at the beginning, he said, ‘We get the right cast, and we’ll tell this story right,’ and he got the right cast.”
That includes Strong, with whom Landau is also very happy.
“I died and went to heaven,” the manager joked when he heard the Succession star would be playing him. “He’s a great guy. We’ve had the chance to know each other, and I’m just dying to see what he does and what I learn from it,” adding that although he and Springsteen aren’t very involved, “we’re very pleased at the way they’re going about it, it’s going to be beautiful.”
For now, the duo is focused on documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, which follows the star on his 2023 international tour. Landau explained at the Los Angeles premiere on Monday that The Boss wanted to do the film post-pandemic as the band hadn’t toured for six years and “a lot of things had happened in his life that had affected him and instead of just making a concert film, he really wanted to tell a story. And that’s what we did. It’s a story of the tour, it’s also the story of his relationship with his lifetime comrades, the E Street Band, and it gets into some of the emotion and upheavals in his life that sort of shaped his most recent music.”
Inside the premiere screening, held at the Academy Museum, Springsteen joked about the project. “If we didn’t make it now, I’d be dead pretty soon so we’ve got to make these while we can,” he said, adding how his Letter to You album was written following the death of former bandmate George Theiss.
“I came back from George’s, and I think he filled me with something where all of Letter to You was written in about two weeks and recorded in four days. You get up around our age, and those are the things you’re thinking about,” he said. “And [wife] Patti [Scialfa] and I have had to deal with her illness and you’re worried about — it’s a part of your life now, questions of mortality, and it just becomes a part of your life. Like I say in the film, there’s a lot more yesterdays and goodbyes once you get up around where we are than there was 30 or 40 years ago.”
Bandmate Steven Van Zandt also joined Springsteen in the post-screening conversation and referenced a moment in the film when the band is able to get an entire stadium to go totally quiet.
“That silence that happens with 50, 60, 70, 80,000, people — at the typical concert, when things get quiet, a slow song, people are going to the bathroom, they’re going to get a beer, you see lots of movement from the stage. With us, nobody moves; not only is everybody silent, which is a miracle, nobody is moving,” Van Zandt said. “And that shows the extraordinary relationship that the audience has with our music. And it’s a real dramatic representation of that personal relationship. They’re there, they’re paying attention, and they want to know every word that he’s saying and every note that we’re playing. And you’re not going to see that very many places.”
Road Diary starts streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Friday.
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