Jeremy Allen White on playing The Boss in "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere"

Asbury Park is a Jersey beach town with heart, history and harmony, not to mention a voice. Bruce Springsteen's presence can still be felt in his old haunts – the Stone Pony, the Wonder Bar, Madam Marie's. The town's welcome mat is its storied boardwalk, where we met Jeremy Allen White. "There's a lot of romance here still, I feel like," said White, who was thinking about his own hometown.

"Do you feel that way a little bit about Brooklyn?" I asked.

"I do, yeah. I always feel at home there."

Had that Brooklyn boy come out here, say, three years ago, he might have been just another tourist. But not anymore. His turn as the talented but tormented chef on the award-winning FX series "The Bear" has made the 34-year-old one of the hottest commodities in Hollywood.

I said, "Early on, it strikes me that if you were just to read the script, it was kind of just a story about a sandwich shop."

"It was a hard thing to explain," said White, "and it sounded something like that, you know? Yes, this, like, kid, he comes back, he's a chef, and he's, like, opening a sandwich shop. And I saw my friends trying to be nice and say, Oh, that sounds great, you know?"

He ended up sweeping nearly all of the awards: Emmys, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, Critics Choice. His two young daughters call them his "trophy winners cups." "They like them, they get a kick out of it, but they also are very honest and there's just like, Why do you get all these things?" White said.

Back out at the Jersey shore, it's not those past awards that matter. It's the ones that might be coming down the Jersey Turnpike for White's performance as Springsteen himself.

And yes, that really is White's voice. He said, "If you're gonna do one thing to get it right, you have to perform to the point of exhaustion. 'Cause he continues until he cannot go any longer.

"Everybody's got their own idea of Bruce Springsteen. And I think at the beginning, I was approaching it like, how am I going to make everybody happy? That's a fool's errand. It's an impossibility."

"Was there a moment that you thought to yourself, Yeah, I got this. I can do this?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so," White replied. "There were moments where I found confidence, but I always wanted more, I wanted more time, I wanted to go deeper."

Springsteen was aware of White before the film. He had seen and admired the emotional complexity in his work, and that's a well Springsteen knew whoever played him needed to have. White said, "Bruce has gone on record and said, you know, I have no problem performing for three hours on stage. That's easy for me. I know exactly who I am on stage. You know, it's the other 21 hours that I have trouble with."

"Did you know any of that before you really took a deep dive?" I asked.

"I mean, I was familiar enough with his music that, you know, I understood his depth, and I understood, you know, we're dealing with a man who's looked over the edge before, absolutely," said White. "But, no."

The film, "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere," based on the book of the same name, follows the making of the 1982 album "Nebraska." Some say it's Springsteen as his best, but he himself may have actually been at his worst.

In his 2016 autobiography, "Born to Run," he describes an emotional breakdown while at a Texas county fair, not long after "Nebraska" was finished:

"I've just pulled a perfect swan dive into my abyss; my stomach is on rinse cycle, and I'm going down, down, down. I just feel a need to get rooted somewhere, before I drift into ether."

White said, "I asked him, what's that panic about? You know, what is that fear inside of you? And he said, 'I had this moment where I felt like an outsider and observer in my own life.'"

I asked, "Have you ever struggled with mental illness yourself?"

"Yeah, of course," said White. "When he told me about that, that feeling of being an observer of your own life, that was very familiar to me. I remember when I found acting, there was a lot of like, I think like, chaos and confusion, just a lot going on. I couldn't focus on myself. And I found acting, and I found some peace and I found some focus."

White has drawn from that emotional trough as early as he can remember, even during his days of doing crime dramas on TV, when he was looking for certain things – not just a job. "Yeah, you know, I was very lucky, I was a kid, so my first agents were kind of confused and upset with me for kind of, like, having a standard for what I would go audition for," he said. "I'd never done anything before when I was 13, and they were like, Just go on the audition, you know?"

One of those auditions landed him on "Shameless." For 11 seasons he played bad boy, big brother, and brainiac Lip Gallagher.

His unruly hair and blue eyes got him counted among the so-called "rodent men" - a term used to describe a few of the most physically desirable things a man can be these days. His Calvin Klein underwear ad certainly helped.

Before we left the shore, we stopped by the Stone Pony, where White tried to re-create on film Springsteen's early glory days.

"Bruce was there, like he was a lot of days, and he came out, and he kind of introduced me to the audience, so he gave them to me all warmed up," White recalled. "They made me feel like a star for three-and-a-half minutes. And then the first A.D. would say 'Cut,' and they would go silent. And I remembered, I am not Bruce Springsteen, I am just an actor!"

A guy from Brooklyn playing a guy from Jersey – they both seem to understand one another, and neither would change a thing.

White said, "The ride is fun, but I'm, you know, I'm filled up. I just want to work with people I admire and be able to keep doing what I love to do. That's what's important to me."

I asked, "So, if all the fame and success ended after this film, you'd feel like ...?"

"Can I still work?"

"Yeah."

"Then, yeah, I'm okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely."

WEB EXTRA: Extended interview - Jeremy Allen White (Video)

To watch a trailer for "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere," click on the video player below:

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Story produced by Sara Kugel. Editor: Steven Tyler.

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