From the Bear ..to the Boss

A PING Bruce Springsteen's genius in the new biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere and perfecting his raspy tone was always going to be a tough task.

- BY MARC BAKER

And it was even more so for actor Jeremy Allen White. First, he wasn't even sure that he could sing, and then also had to deal with the pressure of the Born to Run legend shadowing him 24/7 on set.

Jeremy, who found fame in US comedy-drama The Bear, admits: "It was very hard. Especially because he's sitting there the whole time.

"I had not had a lot of experience - or any experience singing, playing guitar, any of it, before I took on the role. So that was daunting, to say the least, in the beginning.

"I had a lot of time but I didn't have as much time as I would have liked. I had about six months to learn.

"The chords are pretty simple. There's not many of them. And a lot of the songs are in the same key. Yeah. But the singing was a gamble."

Bruce's rugged heartland voice has helped him sell 150 million records - and he is pretty much inimitable.

To get somewhere close, Jeremy, 34, hired Hollywood vocal coach Eric Vetro - who helped Austin Butler prepare for the Elvis biopic and Timothee Chalamet for the Bob Dylan film - to knock his vocal chords into shape.

Jeremy reveals: "You try to find a little bit of that rasp and then you start messing around with that nasal sound, that New Jersey phrasing. I really have to give Eric credit because he was there to say, 'This is how you sing a song. This is how you make it sound good'.

"When I finally sounded like Bruce, that was like a breakthrough."