Actor Jeremy Strong on the spiritual ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:14It's The Treatment. My guest, who I have known since sitting next to me on an airplane going to Toronto 11 years ago now, is Emmy winner, Tony winner, Academy Award nominee. A few things have happened since I've met you. Jeremy Strong. His newest role is playing John Landau in the film Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere. First of all, I have to say this to you. I thought about you when Daniel A. Lewis made a statement recently about method acting and about how it's misinterpreted. And because we had this conversation actually the last time we spoke about that. And I thought about something, I don't know if I ever mentioned to you, but I was friends with Toni Morrison.

0:53And she told me that some of the smartest notes she ever got about her books were from Marlon Brando. who she spent time with on the phone. She said, and he would read her his notes from the pages they'd written. She just said he was one of the most astute readers that she'd ever encountered. And that came from that kind of emotional intelligence that she would ascribe to actors. That's wonderful. Now, I loved what Daniel said last week. You know, essentially that a lot of the narrative that's been sort of pretty prevalent the last few years is I think predicated in a deep misunderstanding of what acting is and has been done by people who know very little about what actors do and I think every actor is in their own way trying to find a way to believe in what they're doing ultimately and I don't know what method acting is i mean i know what stanislavsky said it was that's certainly not what i do according to my understanding it's not what a lot of people who have been called that do but it's about you know bruce springsteen bruce said in his autobiography which is one of the great books talk about emotional intelligence and acuity and depth in born to run he said the real question is about how deeply can you inhabit your song and that's the same you know as an actor you're just trying to inhabit the song being the character and you have to inhabit that as as fully and as deeply as you can and whatever it takes to do that and to create a sense of belief for yourself and and to be committed to that sense of belief you know and i think that that takes people out on all kinds of limbs.

2:47And we live in this age that there's a kind of allergy sometimes in our culture to sincerity, seriousness, rigor. But those are all things that are necessary and vital ingredients for making art. As you say that though, Jeremy, I guess I was thinking that the idea of sincerity and rigor being kind of a balance for each other, that you can have two sides of the same coin and they both sort of operate in balance. That's the thing I think that there's no real understanding of where people dismiss because for Tony, it went back to, and we talked about the Capote profile of Brando. She said he just wanted to paint Brando as this kind of infantile solipsist.

3:34And part of that, if you read between the lines of that piece, you can see he's trying to figure out what he was doing as an actor almost all the time. Because I think what was interesting about that, She said that that became the way then that all method actors were dismissed because it happened in the pages of The New Yorker from Truman Capote. Then it's sort of a pinnacle to all actors who talk this way. And it became a way to sort of say, we don't understand why there are pauses. And if you're going to throw away lines, then why are we watching this? And she actually loved actors. I went to opera with her.

4:03I've gone to plays with her. So I understood where that came from her in a way that sort of pinnacle to the way that she created her characters in her work. And as you were talking about Bruce and that book, I was also thinking about, I wouldn't re-read some Landau essays, the oldest writing essay. And he was as attracted to storytelling through songs as Bruce was. Yeah. I mean, it's why they had such an affinity and a deep understanding together from the beginning. You know, as you know, John was the guy that Jan Wenner called up when he founded Rolling Stone. He was the preeminent music critic in the country.

4:35he said he consumed music as if it were the staff of life you know that's how that's how devoted he was to this art form and he and bruce had they they they talked about in the early days their statement of the blues and the blues were what it is that matters how one might gain it and lose it and the price paid in the attempt so if that's not storytelling i i don't know what is they're both drawn to that but they're both summoned by what I feel is a higher calling and which ultimately is a spiritual calling it's a vocation that is spiritual for the both of them and I think their overall artistic and musical project is a spiritual one it's almost evangelical you know they said this ain't a jet Bruce Rose said early on this ain't a job this ain't a business this is a reason to live so part of what has been so incredible spending time with the two of them and working on this movie is just being in the orbit of that ethos and that energy and being so kind of revivified by it and by them.

5:45Because they still are that way. They have not drifted away from those essential things. It's funny because you're saying, I just think about all those stories about Springsteen and being a movie watcher and actually studying acting. I mean, you can't listen to Dr. This is the Edge of Town and not think of East of Eden. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's funny. Bruce wears a ring that belonged to Steinbeck. Beautiful ring. I was with him in London last week and he was saying how inspired he was by Bob De Niro and by the way Bob worked and by his commitment in those early days. it really made an indelible mark on Bruce and Bruce said I want to give to my work that same level of commitment and intensity that De Niro was giving in those early movies with Marty and you know in Landau he wrote an essay called Confessions of an Aging Rock Critic which is an amazing essay and he was like 28 or 29 at the time and it's all about what happens when you become a professional and I'm making quotation marks here in the studio the idea that you can lose something by routinizing your love or care that passion is the most important ingredient and Landau said in this essay he said without passion there is no commitment without commitment there is nothing no energy no drive no rigor no intensity and ultimately no honesty and so to me that's his like battle cry that's his cri de coeur and that's what bruce i think felt and saw in him and it's why they've been doing what they've been doing together for 50 years because they you know that's that's musicians painters writers actors we're all doing a version of the same thing which is about trying to express something true in us you know bruce wrote about elvis he said that he was someone who lived the life he was driven to live brought forth the truth that was within him and the possibilities within us so that's like to me that's that's that's what we try to do as actors that's what filmmakers try to do it's all the same thing i'm also thinking jeremy this interesting thing that in the last few years i guess between armageddon time and of George Warkers, Roy Cohn, and then, and this, also Succession 2, you've been playing these guys who are fathers.

8:21And each step of the way, I mean, even though there's only, I guess, a couple years' age difference between Landau and Bruce. We should say, by the way, the film is about the making of Springsteen's, or became the album Nebraska at a time of Springsteen's life. He's kind of in free fall, despite having these enormous successes, directed and written by Scott Cooper. And I think what's interesting about these guys, though, is that in this case of Lando, he's the guy who actually is the most silent and the most listening. Because these guys have been kind of infantile father figures. Yeah. And this is the time you get to play somebody who's really, even though he's basically more of an older brother, he's a real nurturer.

8:56Yeah. Listen, I think their relationship is so beautiful. But John, who is only a few years older, maybe three or four years older than Bruce. Yeah, I think a couple, yeah. But, you know, their backgrounds, their personal cultures, you know, John was this very precocious, very cultured. He was at Brandeis. He was a music critic. He was deeply studied, erudite guy, knew about art history, knew about literature, introduced Bruce to all of these things, which became so formative for him and allowed him to place his artistic impulse into a broader context, historical context. He had to channel that ambition.

9:38Yeah. And, and help him translate and coax out that vision because of John's, because of the depth of John's understanding and the depth of his listening. He's, you know, John is like, he's hearing Bruce's early albums. He's hearing darkness. He's, he gives him Flannery O 'Connor because Flannery O 'Connor is writing about the action of grace and territory largely held by the devil. right that's something that's a line and and i think that helped bruce at that time gain a deeper understanding of what it was he was writing about you know bruce was someone when he took that bus in from asbury park to columbia records to go upstairs to john hammond and audition he didn't have a guitar case he didn't know anyone who had been on an airplane you know and john was this guy who was in therapy.

10:37He was a reader. He was, you know, obsessed with John Ford. So, so he was a father figure, but he has, if you know, John, he has a tremendous gravity, tremendous gravity and power that is also compassionate. He is a benevolent force, but he is like, uh, there's something magisterial about him and incredibly sensitive and attuned to the artists. And it's interesting because when you do a deep dive on John, it's almost like you get there and you're redirected to Bruce. John has sort of subsumed his life into the life of Bruce, into the mission, which is to be devoted to the artist, to protect the artist.

11:29I remember Sean Penn told me, wants that he feels like our job is to be a bodyguard for our character and i've i live by that also and john is that for bruce you know he's his he's his bodyguard and he stands between the imperatives of the music business and the world and the the different forces pulling at him and the sanctity of the creative impulse, you know, which John sees it as his job to protect and fertilize. My guest is Emmy and Tony winner Jeremy Strong, who acts record producer and manager John Landau in the film Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere. More with my conversation with him after this.

12:16It's The Treatment. It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest is Jeremy Strong. He's starring as John Landau in the film Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere. I think there's, in some ways, this is almost an archetypal story. Oh, yeah. The rock and roll, the gods of rock and roll touching somebody on the shoulder. Yeah, I mean, the other night Bruce played at the Academy Museum Galley, played three songs. I was crying. I was a mess. I was sitting next to Landau. Landau, who's seen him play, you know, 50 ,000 times. times, the look in his eyes, like it was the first time, the look of amazement and awe and love.

12:58And he was very emotional and he looked over at me and he said, there's only one. And that just, there's only one Bruce Springsteen. And it's not a given that his life ended up this way. That's what I find so profound. uh and in this moment in 1982 you know he had this breakdown you know on a cross-country trip in a state fair where he writes about it in his in his autobiography he felt unfit to live he felt outside of his own life he had all these things that he ostensibly wanted but he had no life there was nothing inside you know he wrote a song once later called nothing man it's one of my favorite songs i can't listen to it without being deeply moved but also because he's sharing something about himself i think but so in that moment it's an inflection point in his life where he either shakes hands with this thing of darkness that has been pressing down on him his whole life or there's going to be a lot of suffering and he doesn't ever become the bruce that we know him to be.

14:05And it was John Landau in that moment in time who was instrumental in helping him take that step towards getting help, getting professional help and going into therapy. Which comes from listening, which comes from... The thing you do with your voice, you even bring your voice down or register, just sort of give us the weight of what he said. John, you mean? John, yes. Well, part of, I think, especially with these characters who are based in real people, Cone, James's father, you mentioned, John, the next one. It's really important to get to render, I think with real precision and accuracy. For me, it's important to get it right, how they are, how they talk, what they sound like, how they move, all of those things.

14:56And then you kind of want to try and hide them. So it's not like you're announcing it or, you know, you don't want the audience. It's not an impression. It's not an impression. You want to kind of disappear the work so that the audience just feels like they're getting an experience of the essence of this person. But there's, you know, endless amounts of work and sweat that go into that. But it's interesting for me, too, just because in the movie, everybody else is sort of talking at him. Everybody else is like, he's sort of being barraged with words by people all the time. And the one person who takes his time around him and waits for his responses, and there's sometimes some really uneasy silences in those conversations, are the conversations with you as Landau.

15:37And I want to ask you about that, just because in terms of sort of timbre, there's not that much difference between this and Roy Cohn, but there's a difference in effect. And he's not rushing the words. You almost hear Roy Cohn and almost feel the clock running down on him and rushing the words out. and John who's, again, you talked about that essay, Confession of Agent Rock Craig, where he was a kid when he wrote it, but he wrote it as if he was a guy in his 40s who was watching the world go past him. And what does it mean if rock and roll keeps living and it's supposedly written by kids trying to figure out who they are?

16:08I mean, there's a lot of stuff in that essay. You found a way to not only physicalize that, but vocalize that. This guy was just waiting to be 50 years old in his own way. I love that you're talking about this because it is his quality of attention and a quality of listening. You know, the great mystic Simone Weil said that attention is a form of prayer. And I think that that's true. And, you know, we're living in a time where our ability and capacity to pay attention is being severely eroded. and it's not an accident that part of Landau's gift and Bruce's gift is their ability to be, to pay attention and to listen.

16:56Because finally what that character is by the end, and there's a great moment where they're sitting in a bedroom, I don't think of this away, but it's a great moment where we sort of feel exactly what the relationship is. Again, it's a sequence with not many words in the scene. So that scene was, you know, really scripted. There was going to be a lot of words. And we were sitting on the edge of a bed having a lot of words. And there's, you know, for people who are going to see the movie, I won't say much about what's going on. But I had an instinct just from the time I'd spent with John and Bruce and observing the nature of their relationship, which a lot of it existed in the silences.

17:33You know, there's a kind of space between them that is like a rest in music. but it is a very pregnant space now it doesn't need words to it's a moment between the verse and the bridge yeah exactly exactly and you know bruce had done one of those vh1 storytellers a million years ago and when i'm working on something i watch everything i'm like a magpie i watch everything and listen to everything and i was watching it the night before we shot that scene and he was telling a story about my father's house the song from nebraska and he was saying you know It was just a song that expressed something that allowed him to say something where words could go no further.

18:13So through the song. And I remember that John and Bruce in the early 70s used to spend a whole night together just playing records for each other. So I had this impulse that I could play him a song in the scene. And I don't give that song away. I won't, but what I will say is that I texted Bruce saying, you know, what song should it be? And I said, if you were going to play a song to save your friend's life, what would you play? And that's what's in the movie. Because first of all, in that song, you can hear everything that Bruce Springsteen has been trying to do. You hear that that's who he wants to be.

18:52Yeah. That guy who's, well, when you say he's part of a famous group, he can't give anything away. But I have to tell you, I never ever thought, because that was my mother's favorite group, she sang gospel. And I never thought I'd hear that song in a movie. And I just, it took the breath out of me in that moment. And it's so powerful that people clearly in the theater didn't know the song. You can still feel that same kind of that moment being so much expressed in there. And it's, to me, that's the movie. That scene is what the whole movie leads to. Well, it's the moment, and this is what Bruce and John said to me, it's the moment I think that the movie becomes spiritual, which is what it should be.

19:34Because if there's a story about Bruce, we have this idea, blue jeans and American flag, which has largely been misappropriated. Born in the USA is a veteran song. Yes. Yeah. But really his legacy is that legacy of gospel, of blues, of soul music. He wants to be, he always wanted to be, you can hear that, he wanted to be an R &B singer. Yeah. More than anything. I mean, it turns into rock and roll because he's able to use his limitations to do that. But if he could be the person he wanted to be, he'd be the guy who's singing and leading that song. I think so. You know, I think there was a moment where Scott wanted him to consider doing his version of that song.

20:22And Bruce is someone with such humility that I don't think he would, you know, that you can't touch that song. Because you can sort of see John's impatience sometimes when he's trying to explain things to people, like in the recording studio. There's an understanding that he has that his real power is a power to not say too much. I went to seek out Jimmy Iovine. We say, by the way, Jimmy has a cameo.

20:48I had fun. I mean, what a legend. But, you know, Jimmy obviously was a studio engineer. That's how he got his start, engineering on that. John hired him. Yeah. And Jimmy said a few things about John, but one of the things he talked about was a phrase that he used called visible thinking, which I loved. And it is, that's something in the character also that I felt was really important to express. you know uh which is a kind of active listening you know john is extremely methodical extremely measured but he does know when to hold back he knows when to insert himself and so part of that is he is architecting and conducting something a life force that is at that moment in time uh unruly at times you know and and and is not going to be controlled so he has to really be connected to what's happening with bruce on an internal level and be sensitive to that uh so that's what i think we tried to capture in the film well again i just think that the the power of and there's not just silence but the quality of listening because again all these characters you played in the last few years, so many of them, even back going to Jerry Rubin, the characters who are almost pathological about their needs to constantly express what they're feeling at that time.

22:13Right. You know, I think it's like there's a peace within John. You know, artists are so roiled with conflict and can be this kind of combination of insecurity and audacity or, you know, have feelings of. it's always this dialectic of of that john is very solid he's very he's a different kind of man than i've than i've played before and there's a kind of trope of a music manager music producer now he's not those things it's funny because jimmy jimmy's almost that guy the devil on his shoulder john john is bruce's producer and manager but he is you know bruce calls him the clark to his Lewis, but he's also, there was a scene that got cut from the movie that I really loved where I was able to express something that I felt was John's real point of view to Al Teller.

23:13There was a scene, and I think it was in the trailer. We used to say Al Teller was at Columbia Records. Yeah, Al Teller was an executive at Columbia Records and just doesn't understand why we would want to release this album. So further amplifies that scene that we saw early on. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Why Bruce would want to release this album on the heels of the river? You know, this album is not commercial. It's not going to have charting singles. The criteria for success, according to Columbia Records, this album is not going to meet any of those things. So one of the kind of things John Hammond would ever have liked.

23:43Yeah. And Landau basically, and a lot of things don't make it into movies. And sometimes they make it in invisibly because you've expressed it already but you know bruce gave this interview with david remnick way back where he said i'm a repairman and my job is to repair wounds in myself and when i can do that then my music can be healing you know jung said that only that which is really ourselves has the power to heal so i think john understood not just this album you know the chess moves of a career this album is you know influenced by these voices it's more about the the deep substrate of what is going on in this artist's life and i think he was able to perceive that you know bruce wrote about this in his autobiography that growing up in freehold they had no heat in the house and he had a hole in the floor of his bedroom and the heat would come up from the kitchen stove and i found myself thinking about that as a metaphor for a lot of us of just like a hole there's a hole in us and the heat has to come from somewhere and it often comes from our past from trauma from you know from whatever unreconciled stuff yeah exactly exactly and so those are the things i think that john understood about bruce and then they've always wanted to bring big medicine to the world.

25:29I mean, it's almost a grandiose, well, I shouldn't say grandiose. It is grand. It is grand. It is grand. Because it is. The reason I go back to Doctors on the Edge of Town and that song cycle and Steinbeck, because this felt very much like Steinbeck to me. That album always did. In fact, hearing Highway Patrolman in the film, it's like that could be something out of Steinbeck. Yeah. Yeah, he has these, as you say, archetypal songs about Cain and Abel, songs about the fundamental tensions and fundamental conflicts between people. Now, he is one of one. He is, but so is Landau too, because again, that scene with Jimmy is funny.

26:13Let's not give anything away with that, because that's archetypal too, and it's made in this kind of story. Yeah. But it's also the idea of, I feel like your understanding was, if I give my patience to him, then I'm giving him license to be patient with himself. Yes, exactly. John wrote in Growing Young with Rock and Roll, I think the same essay that he famously wrote in 1974 where he said, I've seen rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. That's the thing John Landau is sort of most known for to the public, I think. he wrote that for him the criterion for art in rock is the capacity of the artist to create a personal almost private universe and to express it fully so what he's doing while bruce is you know recording these demos on the edge of his bed of nebraska you know this is he is now being put to the test of, okay, well, here's a private universe being expressed fully.

27:12It might not be exactly what he thought would follow the river, but this needs to be and was for him an article of faith that he was on the side of the artist and of a complete expression of something. I want to thank my guest, who may be the only person in the history of the show that used the word criterion correctly, Jeremy Strong. He's playing John Landau. It's always a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for being here. It's so great to talk to you. I saw her standing on her front lawn Just a twirl in her butt on Jeremy Strong came to our attention with his Emmy-winning starring role in HBO, Succession.

28:00He now plays John Landau in the biopic, Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere. actors, writers, photographers, and more at the archive kcrw.com slash the treatment I'm Elvis Mitchell there's more to come with a sawdard 14 on my lap through the badlands

28:32It's The Treatment I'm Elvis Mitchell you can also hear the show at kcow.com slash the treatment. For over 100 installments, my guest Christopher Fenimore has been conducting a glimpse into style and lifestyle in his column, Five Fits With. He is a fashion maven, a style maven, I should say, and a photographer on his own, and he conducts interviews and does all the photographs. A list of guests have gone from, oh my gosh, to see from Ken Lung, who we had here on the show, to Sir Paul Smith. First of all, Chris, thank you so much for doing this. It's an honor to be here. One of the things I love about the column is that in every single column you ask somebody if they had just one outfit to wear, what would it be?

29:20And I wonder where that question came from, because it's such a terrific question. I don't remember exactly, you know, the inception of that question. I think it's something that It gets pretty much an interesting response from every single person. Usually they're curious about what the weather is, what event they're going to. And I tell them that none of that matters. Just, you know, imprinted for the rest of your life. One outfit. It takes you to a really interesting place. It's a funny thing to end on. Interesting thing to end on, I should say. It is. Because I guess I'm struck so often that people go to comfort for that.

29:55Because the people you've chosen have a way of dressing for comfort and style at the same time. So the response so often is T-shirts. It's kind of astonishing to me. Well, it's a funny thing because you see, you know, runway designers, like a ticket of like Johnson Anderson, Simone de L 'Otio. Like you have these people who come out after doing these super cerebral, interesting collections and they're wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It's something that at the end of the day, people are super comfortable in to the point where they would rather look somewhat anonymous for the rest of their life.

30:26It's kind of a funny thing when they do the style feature and then at the end they're like, you know, I'd rather look like everybody else, basically. I want to ask you where the column came from. We should say that Esquire as a magazine has had a long, basically a lifelong occupation, preoccupation with style and what that says about people. And we should remind people, those who don't know, that GQ started off as the kind of appendage of Esquire. So, I mean, everything we think of in this country as being the way that style is seen, Esquire is foundational to, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I started a version of this series on a blog 13 years ago.

31:04So this is when Tumblr was pretty popular. You know, I was working at a men's store in New York City called Carson Street Clothiers, and it doesn't exist anymore, but it was a really special moment in time. And I had met a lot of people that worked in the fashion industry, kind of specifically in menswear in New York City. And so I called it in medias res, which means kind of it's in the middle of things. It's a literary term, as I'm sure you know. But I was also literally shooting them in the middle of the road. So I would meet people each day before work, which is kind of where the five outfits came from.

31:32So it was kind of insane. I'd meet them on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you know, before they were going to work and whatever they were wearing. No interview component. So that's the original inception. Did it for a website called Four Pins, which doesn't exist anymore. And that's when the interview components started to come into play and really simple stuff like a few weren't answers over email typically. But I just kept at it. I did it with Grails after Four Pins. And I think I did maybe 40, 50 installments with them before they wanted to discontinue it. So I posted the very last one I did, which was with Emily Bodie on Instagram.

32:06And I said, hey, if anybody wants to pick this series up, I'd love to keep doing it. And a friend who is an editor at Esquire named Johnson Evans reached out. And that's kind of where we started. Again, going back to Sir Paul Smith, you know, basically him sort of creating his own thing. And I love what he says in his piece. At one point, we asked him about the thing he wore every day. And he said, I guess I don't really think about it, but I'm always wearing suits. Even during the pandemic, when I was the only person in the factory, I was still wearing a suit every day. It's funny you mentioned his because his is to this day one of my favorite ones that I've done.