Jeremy Strong has, of late, been prone to transformation on-screen. In last year’s The Apprentice, he became a late-in-life Roy Cohn, the venomous mentor to Donald Trump—all bluster with a thick Bronx accent and short temper. He earned plaudits for his dedication to sinking into the role, and his first Oscar nomination. Next year, he’ll play Mark Zuckerberg—older and cannier—in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network. In each case, Strong told me over a recent coffee, he pored over public footage, home videos, and whatever else he could get his hands on to gear up for his performance. But while making his latest movie, the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the actor had access to something of a cheat: The real guy was sitting right there on set.
“It’s like having an oracle that you can go directly to,” Strong said, recalling the uncommon phenomenon of seeing the man he was portraying—Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager, Jon Landau—seated behind the monitors. Springsteen, too, was there to watch as Strong’s co-star Jeremy Allen White conjured the artist at a specific moment in his life: the recording of the album Nebraska, back in 1981. “I spent time with Jon,” Strong explained. “I drilled him with questions.” The Adolescence Emmy winner Stephen Graham, who plays Springsteen’s father in flashbacks, described Strong as “like a magpie.” “And he’s right,” Strong said; both the bird and the actor are “just collecting, scavenging for anything. And you don’t even know, really, what you’re looking for.”
Strong’s discovery efforts as a performer are involved—heavy on research and preparation—and he essentially stays in character on set. “I find, though, that a lot of the work is about creating almost, like, an anechoic chamber, where everything else can disappear,” Strong told me. “It’s very witchy.” The goal, he noted, is that the role “just takes over and takes possession of you, and you don’t think about it anymore.” His approach is a cousin to Method acting that he’s previously referred to as “identify diffusion”; unlike the Method, it relies on intense character work, not on tapping into one’s own life experiences. Strong’s process has been much discussed in the press as he’s taken on meatier roles; his on-set manner, too, has been painted as stiff and a little wacky, particularly by some of his cast mates on the show Succession. The actor starred as the melancholic, striving media failson Kendall Roy, a role that the show’s executive producer Adam McKay said Strong performed “like he’s Hamlet.”
Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. (Briarcliff Entertainment / Everett Collection
In person, I found Strong to be not alienating, as certain co-stars of his have suggested, but deeply, devotionally sincere: He ordered yogurt with the same hushed politeness he had while discussing Laurence Olivier. He was resolute about his technique’s efficacy while maintaining an awareness that it can come across as, well, mystical. “I have infinite respect for anyone who has the kind of courage to be willing to make a fool of themselves on a set,” he said, chuckling—as in, someone such as himself. Yet Strong’s recent habit of tunneling into tragic characters has clearly piled up. As Cohn, the actor had to go somewhere more unnerving: into the mind of an antagonistic creature renowned for his public misdeeds, as he struggled with aging, illness, and his eventual abandonment by Trump in the 1980s. “I was affected working on The Apprentice because of how dark it was. And it was a hard shoot; it was hard doing press for it, just the whole aura of it,” Strong said of the weight that the film placed on him. “Trump wrote about us, called us human scum, threatened anyone involved with the movie.” He was up for a creative risk, he said—less so a public one. Deliver Me From Nowhere arrived at the right time: “After Roy Cohn’s gospel of vitriol and lies and nihilism, my job for a better part of a year was to listen to Bruce Springsteen records.”
The Apprentice and Deliver Me From Nowhere aren’t complete opposites—the latter is hardly a laugh riot, and for Strong, it’s another plum supporting part as a mentor of sorts. Unlike the strong-willed Cohn for Trump, however, Landau serves as a pure sounding board for Springsteen. The film depicts the singer-songwriter as he wrangles some of his worst depressive episodes. Not long after the release of his chart-topping album The River, Springsteen enters an introspective stretch: He moves to a ranch in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and subsumes himself in books and movies, drawing creative inspiration from, among others, Flannery O’Connor, Woody Guthrie, and Terrence Malick (particularly the latter’s film Badlands).
Out of this jumble of Americana comes Nebraska, an album Springsteen creates from solo demos on a simple tape recorder. He assumes that he will expand on the songs in the studio later on with the E Street Band, but as time progresses, he can’t shake the raw quality of the early recordings, and he eventually prevails on Landau and his record label to put out the original takes as an album. The period is a fascinating sliver of Springsteen’s biography, but the stakes of Deliver Me From Nowhere don’t hinge on whether Nebraska will resonate once it’s released; after all, moviegoers likely know its reputation as a rock masterpiece. Instead, the director Scott Cooper’s film turns on Landau recognizing that the tracks reflect Springsteen confronting inner darkness—including his conflicted feelings about his father and his fear of his growing fame—and nudging the musician to realize his need for further help.
In many a music biopic, the manager character poses a problem or an obstacle to the artist. Here, Landau functions more as an emotional keystone. A pivotal scene sees him sharing with Springsteen his worries about the singer’s despondent moods. As written, the exchange involves Landau speaking with his client directly. But Strong, after talking with the real Landau, decided that playing music was the pair’s true emotional shorthand; his character thus tries to get through to Springsteen by playing a Sam Cooke song. The actor had asked Springsteen what record might have worked, and the singer had offered some initial suggestions. None, Strong said, felt like the best fit. “I said to Bruce, ‘What I’m looking for is: What song would you play if you wanted to save your friend’s life?’ He said, ‘Let me think,’” the actor recalled. “Half an hour later—it’s almost midnight—he said, ‘You’ve stumped the band.’” Eventually, Springsteen sent over the Cooke song, called “The Last Mile of the Way.” The exchange represents what Strong dubbed “organic discovery,” a way to blend his immersion and his access to real-life figures to add greater texture, even if the “truth” that’s being revealed is more poetic than literal.
Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau in Deliver Me From Nowhere. (Macall Polay / 20th Century Studios)
Springsteen proved important to the actor’s research too. “When you get to the center of the map, where Jon Landau is, you’re redirected to Bruce Springsteen,” Strong told me. Landau has his own history, of course—he was a music critic for Rolling Stone and elsewhere in the late 1960s, and had impassioned ideas about the development of rock and roll in the United States. Strong devoured all of that material while accompanying Landau to Springsteen shows, where he’d watch the manager watch his client. “The expression of sheer love and awe in his eyes, it makes me want to cry,” Strong said; he was struck by “the amount to which they care in this very cynical time that we live in, where people get all kinds of shit for caring about something too much.”
Strong faces that charge himself. Playing someone such as Cohn, a public and much-imitated figure, is hard enough. Strong’s approach (listening to hours and hours of Cohn’s speeches, staying in character the whole time) adds another taxing layer to that effort. He seems not to know another way to achieve what he wants—he needs “a feeling of an inner authority so that I can believe in what I’m doing,” he said. The focus required remains the same whether he’s playing a famous figure or a version of someone’s parent, as he did in the director James Gray’s semi-autobiographical film Armageddon Time. Strong offered an analogy: “You’re like a deep-sea diver, and you put the weight on your vest, you get down to depth, and you stay down there.” To return to the surface too early would leave him, as he put it, “diluted.”
His co-star White, Strong said, was similarly locked in; the two barely talked on set, each submerged in their character bubble. But few moviegoers know what Landau looks or sounds like. White, by contrast, is pretending to be one of America’s greatest musical icons, even doing his own singing. He was also, perhaps appropriately for a man who is best known for his hangdog charm on The Bear, meant to capture a low moment in Springsteen’s life. “I knew that what he was doing was really fucking hard, next to impossible. And so I was just trying to be there for him. And it was very easy,” Strong said. Landau is the same way—a “steady hand,” as Springsteen’s frequent collaborator Jimmy Lovine explained, according to Strong. “So that’s what I’m there to be.”
As Zuckerberg in Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, Strong will be assuming a role that was played with nervy, youthful pique by Jesse Eisenberg back in 2010. Strong told me that he was in the middle of his latest transformation attempt, and that chatting with me was an active distraction: “There’s something called ‘switching costs.’ And when you’re trying to do press, and you’re being a parent—every time your attention switches, you slide back down the hill.” He did seem content to slide down the hill a little, though, and sit at a diner drinking coffee with me. Whatever spooky, self-involved capital-A Actor I’d imagined I would be having lunch with was not present. Maybe it’s because Landau was a comparatively calm, sweet role to inhabit. Or maybe it’s just because, for all the intensity, Strong clearly adores the challenge he creates for himself.
