“Three years after Austin Butler played Elvis Presley in 2022’s Elvis, he and Jeremy Allen White discussed the boundaries they had to navigate while playing real people in light of the latter’s portrayal of Bruce Springsteen in the upcoming movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. During a conversation for Interview magazine’s fall 2025 cover story”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Butler went on to say that the experience “becomes a boundary.” He continued, “And then at a certain point you blow the roof off and it’s your soul and his soul merging in some way.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” White said before revealing he had a similar experience while portraying Springsteen. “I can look at his performances, and I can watch interviews, but these are public versions. They’re performative in some sense. No matter how honest you are when you’re talking to the press, that’s not how you’re going to talk to your mother.”
White continued, “I was running into the same thing where I was like, ‘Does this sound or look like him?’ Because I had all this footage I could go off of, but you don’t know what this man looks like alone in a house. There’s more freedom, but then you’re questioning that freedom. It’s exactly what you said. At a certain point, you let go and hope that whatever feeling you’re getting close to at least held hands with Bruce’s feeling.”
Another topic the actors discussed was how they managed to find inspiration for their characters.
While Butler wasn’t able to personally get to know the late Presley, he said he benefited from filming Elvis away from home in Australia. “I was fortunate to be far from the life that I lived on a day-to-day basis, because I was in Australia. And then COVID happened, so the entire world was a different place,” he said. “It allowed me to immerse myself in the delusion a little bit more than I would’ve otherwise.”
White’s experience of playing Springsteen was much different because the musician was present for much of the filming, and they also got to know each other outside of the set.
“Bruce was a producer on the film, and he and his manager, Jon Landau, who Jeremy Strong plays in the film, were both around quite a bit. They’ve had this beautiful relationship for so long, and they’ve been so in control of Bruce’s career, of his image, of every aspect of his public life,” he said. “It makes total sense why these guys would want to be around as much as they were because I think it’s the first little bit of control that they’ve ever given up, to Scott [Cooper]our director, and to me and to everybody. And so I totally understand him wanting to be there.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere will debut in theaters on Oct. 24.