Jeremy Strong, the Emmy award winning actor who played eldest son and troubled soul Kendall Roy on HBO’s hit TV show Succession, is in talks to star in the much-anticipated Bruce Springsteen film Deliver Me From Nowhere. Strong would play Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, a development first reported by Variety.
Springsteen will be played by Jeremy Allen White, who is currently starring in the TV show The Bear (and a Calvin Klein underwear campaign).
The movie Deliver Me From Nowhere is based on Warren Zane’s 2023 book of the same name. It tells the story of Springsteen making his 1982 album Nebraska, which The Inquirer described at the time as “quiet, understated and sobering,” sharing “[Woody] Guthrie’s sense of Old Left liberalism and outrage, the idea that society can be responsible for people’s welfare, or can drive them over the edge.”
Springsteen recorded the album alone in a rented room in Colts Neck, N.J., while he was separately recording Born in the U.S.A. with the E Street Band. The pared-down music on Nebraska was rooted in his lonely grappling with fame and childhood demons.
Both Springsteen and Landau are involved in making the film, which will be directed by Scott Cooper. It is set to begin shooting in the fall, after White wraps The Bear in June, and will have a global release. Before that, Strong will appear as President Donald Trump’s one-time mentor, attorney Roy Cohn, in the forthcoming film The Apprentice.
Strong is known for his intense method-style of acting. Though Succession was often a dramatic comedy, Strong did not see his character as funny, and did not play him as such. He described his acting process as “identity diffusion” in a New Yorker profile that went viral in part because of Strong’s deadly serious take on his work.
“If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything — anything — that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene,” he told the New Yorker. “And usually that means clearing away almost everything around and inside you, so that you can be a more complete vessel for the work at hand.”
