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Jeremy Allen White has received a special “good luck charm” from the boss himself, Bruce Springsteen.
In an interview with CBS Mornings that first aired on Thursday, Oct. 16, the actor, 34, told host Gayle King that the musician, 76, gave him a baseball hat that he’s had for 30 years. “I have an old Mets hat that I wear very often that’s pretty tattered up and torn,” White said. “I wore it at Telluride Film Festival, where I spent a lot of time with Bruce.”
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“I saw Bruce last week and he brought me another hat. And it’s this hat right here,” The Bear actor continued, pointing to the New York Yankees hat he was donning on camera. He added, “This is the hat he’s had for 30 years. All tattered and torn. So now, I’ve been carrying it around as a good luck charm.”
White is portraying the rock legend in the new biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which follows a young Springsteen as he records and releases his 1982 album, Nebraska.
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In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, White reveals he had limited time to train his voice for the role. As a result, he was not fully prepared to belt out the rock star’s 1984 song ,”Born in the U.S.A.,” when he came time to perform the song on camera. “My first thing was, ‘Can I perform these songs with a little bit of honesty? Can I do justice to the lyrics?’ ” he said of his approach to covering Springsteen’s music for the Scott Cooper-directed flick.
“Hopefully if there’s enough truth in this music, whether it sounds exactly like Bruce or not, people will connect with it,” White continued. “We kind of got into trying to get closer to Bruce’s voice, but then there’s certain songs like ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ where there was nothing that could have prepared me.”
White also had to learn how to play guitar for the movie, and told PEOPLE that he had “never really held a guitar” prior to taking the part. “I felt like I was like an alien,” he said of his first guitar lesson.
He added, “I didn’t understand where my fingers [go], how my fingers were supposed to behave. It was a very humbling start. I thought, ‘There’s no way in seven months I’m gonna be able to figure this out. But like anything, it was a lot of repetition.”
