We got our first look at Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen with Wednesday’s release of the trailer for the new biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, but it’s not the first time the rock legend has been portrayed on screen.
In fact, over the last forty years, six different Saturday Night Live performers have played The Boss. How do they each stack up to White’s portrayal? Judge for yourself with this breakdown of SNL’s (many) takes on the musician.
Gary Kroeger
Weeks after the charity supergroup single “We Are the World” took the world by storm in 1985, SNL took Prince to task for not participating in the project with a Season 10 cold open. As Billy Crystal’s Prince belts out “I Am Also the World,” he’s interrupted by Gary Kroeger doing his best Boss—the first time Springsteen was lampooned on the sketch show. Here, Springsteen is only able to bark out two lines between pummels from Hulk Hogan and Mr. T (playing Prince’s bodyguards), but Kroeger’s growl is spot on.
Adam Sandler
Adam Sandler debuted his Bruce impression in 1993 on Weekend Update, performing a ballad about Thanksgiving.
The next season, he delivered what is technically SNL’s only take on Springsteen that travelled back in time. For Courtney Cox’s 1995 monologue, they recreated the 1984 music video for “Dancing in the Dark,” which a pre-fame Cox had starred in.
Will Forte
Will Forte trotted out his attempt at a Springsteen in a 2004 sketch that depicted John Kerry (Seth Meyers) at a presidential campaign stop. Though Forte’s Springsteen only appears in the first 30 seconds of the sketch, he’s the first of SNL’s many portrayers to convincingly lock-in on the musician’s trademark underbite.
Ben Stiller
When former cast member Ben Stiller returned to host SNL for the second time, he starred in a commercial parody about a new Springsteen DVD box set: “Just the Stories,” in which Stiller rambles out various stories before cueing his band for songs with grunted count-offs.
Beck Bennett
On the heels of Springsteen’s 2021 Spotify podcast Renegades with Barack Obama, Beck Bennett debuted his Springsteen impression on “Weekend Update” alongside Chris Redd’s take on Barack Obama. After Bennett delivers a small snippet of fictional lyrics about a boardwalk, the pair attempt to show off their conversational improv skills to Michael Che.
Andrew Dismukes
Most recently, Andrew Dismukes took on modern-day Springsteen in 2024 with a Season 50 sketch about Hollywood’s most recent rock icon movie, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Appearing alongside James Austin Johnson’s Dylan and Paul Mescal’s Bono, Dismukes captures Springsteen’s gravelly voice in a mostly spoken impression, but like Bennett before him, Dismukes does treat viewers to half a line of song—this time with “Born to Run.”
