Jeremy Allen White opened up about how he handles being an in-demand Hollywood actor while raising his two daughters.
The two-time Emmy Award-winning star of The Bear shares daughters Ezer Billie, 6, and Dolores Wild, 4, with his ex-wife, Addison Timlin. (The couple separated in 2023 after three years of marriage and Timlin filed for divorce in May of that year.)
White’s most recent high-profile role was playing legendary rocker Bruce Springsteen in the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, which chronicles the musician’s battles with his record label while making the landmark 1982 album Nebraska. (The Scott Cooper-directed movie is based on author Warren Zanes’ 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere and also features a leading performance from Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau.)
Speaking to London’s The Times, White, 34, admitted that the demands of playing Springsteen took its toll on every facet of his life — including fatherhood.
“I feel like I’m ‘pain for hire,’” he joked. “Like I’m getting paid to put myself in painful places. On The Bear, it’s not like I walk around punching walls and screaming in my closet. But I stay close to that energy and it’s uncomfortable — and filming the Bruce movie was incredibly difficult. I was in isolation. I was far from my children. I didn’t travel home much. It made me unwell and when I came out of it I thought, ‘There has to be a better way.’”
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White admitted to facing more “scrutiny [with] something going on in my personal life that has been of interest” since The Bear became successful, though he’s tried to keep life with his children as grounded as possible.
“After a while, people will stop following you once they realise that all you do is pick up your kids from school and come home. My life — my normal life — is very simple,” he insisted.
White likened his daily routine to any other parent when he’s not on a Hollywood film set.
“Like today. I made breakfast for my daughters, took them to school and later I will pick them up and make dinner,” he explained.
White joked that, unlike the accomplished chef he plays on The Bear, he only has “seven dinner dishes I do well, and three my children enjoy.”
“You do the prep, then they take a bite and just ask for chicken nuggets,” he teased.
White has traditionally been reluctant to discuss his private life, though he did make a rare comment about the breakdown of his marriage to Timlin, 34, after she filed for divorce in 2023. He told British GQ that 2023 was an “insane” year with “a lot of high highs [and] a lot of terribly low lows.”
“With everything going on in my personal life, I thought, ‘OK, let’s just pump the brakes in general, and maybe you don’t work for a while,’” he explained in November 2023. “I made this choice to not work for the rest of the year and just be with my daughters and just slow it all down.”
White briefly entered into a relationship with Rosalía following his divorce from Timlin, before splitting with the Spanish singer, 33, in mid-2024. Still, the actor showed his respect for Rosalía in an October interview when he was asked to name his favorite Spanish music artist.
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“Rosa, Rosalía, I love so much, she’s wonderful. She’s flamenco,” White told Spain’s Los 40 radio station. “Otherwise, no, nothing’s coming to mind, not right now.”
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere premieres in U.S. theaters on October 24.
