Jeremy Allen White would give anything to work with Paolo Sorrentino: “His films are just so stunning”
One advantage to being Aaron Sorkin, known as one of the finest screenwriters in existence, is that when you write a new movie, you know you’re going to be able to cast some of the very best actors around in it.
Sure enough, this year’s long-awaited sequel to The Social Network will feature not just Jeremy Strong, Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku and Anora’s Mikey Madison, but former Bruce Springsteen himself, Jeremy Allen White.
That reads like a roll call of the most award-nominated actors under 40 in Hollywood, and it’s a sign of the regard White is now held in after last year’s portrayal of ‘The Boss’ and his sterling work on four seasons of the culinary chaos that is The Bear.
Although he had done plenty of TV work in the past, most notably getting his breakthrough on the US version of Shameless, where he spent 11 seasons as the hedonistic ‘Lip’ Gallagher, he undoubtedly took things up several notches for The Bear as the head chef and owner of a Chicago sandwich shop with dreams of haute cuisine. So good was he in the show as ‘Carmy’ Berzatto that he won the Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor in a TV Comedy’ (bizarre, since The Bear is pretty straight up and occasionally tragic drama), an unprecedented three years in a row, and was nominated the fourth year too.
His success led to a movie role that flew under the radar a little, 2023’s wrestling drama The Iron Claw, in which he starred alongside Zac Efron as one of three brothers looking to take over the world of professional wrestling. Distributed by A24, it was acclaimed by critics and did well at the box office, doubling the budget. White then moved on to Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the biopic about Bruce Springsteen making his lo-fi classic Nebraska, which didn’t quite perform as hoped, although the actor picked up a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor’, thanks to the dedication he showed towards his performance, including learning the guitar from scratch.
However, his Golden Globe shout didn’t translate into an Oscar nomination, in the competitive field, which also includes Leonardo DiCaprio for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and it is this Anderson that White would love to work under, saying he would “have to be way up the list”.
Notwithstanding, he also reserves particular praise for an Italian director who is not a global name like Anderson, but is well known in his native Italy and throughout the industry as a modern-day successor to the greats, including Federico Fellini and Blow Up’s Michelangelo Antonioni.
White told Esquire, “I love Paolo Sorrentino, I’ve been watching a lot of Sorrentino. The Great Beauty is one of my all-time favourites. When I saw that movie in the theatre, I stepped out of the theatre and bought another ticket for the next showing, and that’s the only time I’ve ever done that. But, man, all of his films are just so stunning and romantic. And I don’t speak or understand Italian, but those are films that I can watch without subtitles, even watch on mute, and still understand the story, still understand the characters. There’s something so universal and understandable about his filmmaking.”
Sorrentino picked up the Oscar for ‘Best International Film’ thanks to The Great Beauty, but was also nominated for his semi-autobiographical 2022 drama The Hand of God. His most recent film was last year’s La Grazia, about an ultra-religious Italian President coming to the end of his term and deciding whether or not to legalise euthanasia. White, meanwhile, has voiced a character in the upcoming Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian & Grogu.
