Jeremy Allen White woke up ‘many nights in cold sweats’ playing Bruce Springsteen

Jeremy Allen White played Bruce Springsteen in the music legend’s 2025 biopic.

Jeremy Allen White woke up “many nights in cold sweats” amid the pressure of playing Bruce Springsteen in the music legend’s biopic.

The 35-year-old actor relished playing the Dancing in the Dark hitmaker, 77, in 2025’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, but the experience also prepared him to play former Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz in 65-year-old Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning.

Allen White told People: “I was so excited to meet Aaron. I’ve loved Aaron for so long, but when I read the script, I realised it was a real person and…and I know what that responsibility is like.

“I had just got done playing a real and very public person, and it was a great adventure, and I loved so much of it, but it was also… it made me wake up in the middle of the night, many nights, in cold sweats.”

Speaking about the responsibility of portraying Jeff, he added: “So I was nervous about it.”

The Social Reckoning, the standalone sequel to Sorkin’s 2010 biographical drama, The Social Network, explores the 2021 Facebook leak by the 42-year-old whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Jeff Horwitz.

The exposes alleged that Facebook let some high-profile users break its rules, allowed posts that encouraged violence or harassment, hid research showing Instagram could harm young teens, especially girls, and made changes to its algorithm that made users “angrier”, among other claims.

And Allen White said it was important for him to tell the story as “honestly” as he could.

He explained: “I felt the big responsibility to play Jeff, a real person, but I think more so I felt the responsibility to tell the story as honestly as possible.

“It is a really compelling story, and I share, I think, in the perspective of Aaron and his writing and Jeff and Frances.

“So I think where I felt a pressure or responsibility most was understanding Jeff’s perspective as much as possible, and really just trying to understand the world as much as possible – which was a total mystery, really, to me before I began preparation and remains a mystery to a certain extent.”

The Social Network was about 42-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the founding of Facebook, and Sorkin says its standalone sequel is something else entirely, with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) in the role of a supporting character.

Sorkin told The Hollywood Reporter: “It’s not just that he’s older now or that he’s made $120 billion; the company’s worth a trillion dollars and has three billion users. It’s no longer a social media company. It’s no longer about keeping in touch with your friends from school. Now they’ve added a newsfeed, and that newsfeed is run by an algorithm.

“So you’re getting different news than I’m getting, than he’s getting, than they’re getting. We’re all living in our own world.”