Jeremy Strong can be a little intense. The Succession star who has established a reputation for being hyper dialed-in to his roles proved it again on Thursday night (Sept. 25) when he told The Late Show host Stephen Colbert that not only does he play Bruce Springsteen‘s legendary manager, Jon Landau, in the upcoming biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, but he embodied him so completely that when the real Landau was on set he wasn’t sure who was whom.
“You are famous for going deeply into character,” Colbert said to Strong, who revealed that Springsteen and Landau were on the set of the film “almost every day” during the shoot. “Jon has been a friend, mentor, manager, producer, co-pilot for nearly 50 years,” Strong said as Colbert held up a shot of the actor on set with Landau, Springsteen, director Scott Cooper and the film’s star, Jeremy Allen White.
Wondering if method man Strong even realized that Landau was on set most days, Colbert asked, “did you notice him? Or did you notice him more because you were so him?” Strong said he was able to relate to Landau “as Jon,” explaining that as an actor, “you walk out on this limb. You find ways to believe in what you’re doing.”
And then he dropped the Strong sauce, adding, “And in a way, if Jon Landau… if I’m Jon Landau, who’s that guy over there?” Colbert had to laugh at that Jedi acting mind trick, comparing it to the famous Star Trek season one episode “The Enemy Within,” in which a transporter malfunction creates two contemporaneous Capt. Kirks.
For real, though, Strong said Allen really had to do the heavy lifting in the film that chronicles the then about-to-be-even-more-massive singer’s interior retreat to write the stark, story-cycle Nebraska album. For example, he said, Allen had to perform “Born in the U.S.A.” at the Power Station studio in Manhattan where it was originally recorded by the Boss while Springsteen and Landau were watching.
“It’s a movie about integrity and authenticity and healing,” Strong said. “It’s a story about a time in Bruce’s life in 1982 where he was, I would say, trying to find, in James Baldwin’s words, ‘an honest place to stand.’” Strong also noted that even before he signed on to the film that is due out on Oct. 24, he was a Springsteen superfan, revealing which Boss song he played at his wedding.
“[The album] is about someone struggling with the feeling of being unfit to live, which is a lyric in the album,” said Strong. “I’m someone who… I had a song of his played at my wedding, ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ [from 1992’s Lucky Town] and Nebraska is an album I’ve always loved, so to give back even a modicum of something to give back to someone who has given so much to all of us was a real privilege.”
Strong also talked to Colbert about his new documentary, The White House Effect, which zooms in on the origin story of the climate crisis at a time in the 1990s when climate science began to get politicized.
Watch Strong on The Late Show below.
