Actors dabbling in music and musicians trying their hand at acting has been an ongoing trend in Hollywood for almost as long as the moving image has existed, but it’s clearly not something Bruce Springsteen is interested in.
To put things into context, ‘The Boss’ released his debut studio album in 1973, but he didn’t make his acting debut until 2014 when he appeared in a single episode of Nordic crime dramedy Lilyhammer as an undertaker, which was no doubt largely driven by the fact Steven Van Zandt played the lead role in the show.
It remains the one and only time Springsteen has ever popped up in a movie or TV show where he isn’t playing himself, so it goes without saying testing his dramatic chops isn’t high on the agenda. That doesn’t mean he isn’t an avid viewer, though, with a select band of performers having been massive inspirations for the legendary artist since his earliest days.
Much of his discography hinges on arena-sized rock with roots buried deep in working-class Americana, so it’s not going to shock anybody to discover Springsteen has always been a massive fan of the western genre. As a style, filmmaking doesn’t get any more American than the dusty plains and wide-open vistas of the Old West, and that lifelong adoration was key to his 19th studio album, Western Stars.
As he explained to the Ashbury Park Press, he’d been raised on a steady diet of westerns since childhood, with John Wayne invariably standing tallest. “It’s sort of intertwined in my life,” he said of ‘The Duke’. “If you grew up as a child in the ’50s of course he was just a huge a western star, he was the western star, and the civilised western man all through the ’50s and ’60s.”
That admiration isn’t reflected politically when Springsteen and Wayne occupied opposing sides of that particular divide, but that didn’t stop him from lauding his impact anyway. “The films he made are eternal,” he continued. “They’re just beautiful and forever and his performances in them are things of wonder as far as I’m concerned.”
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a firm favourite of Springsteen’s, so it makes perfect sense that John Ford would be another touchstone. Pointing to the “amazing group of characters” the director regularly roped in that included ‘The Duke’ and Ward Bond, no discussion about the most important names in the history of the western is complete without Clint Eastwood, so he was always going to make the cut.
“He was a sort of opposite end of the spectrum,” ‘The Boss’ mused. “But John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper; they were towering figures to me as a child.” It’s a sentiment shared by anyone with a soft spot for the western, with all of those names comfortably sitting among the medium’s most popular, distinguished, and easily identifiable actors.
