Jeremy Allen White is renovating his home. He has lived in the same 1920s cottage-style house in Los Angeles for seven years, and has recently been giving the place an overhaul, he says, “one room at a time.” He’s already done the kitchen, and next year, when he goes back to work, he’s planning on having his own and the guest bathroom redone. “You can always switch things up,” White says. It’s a principle that applies to home decor as seamlessly as to White’s entire existence, which has been basically rebuilt from the studs up over the last 18 months.
But change is incremental, and so on this particular Los Angeles day in October, all White really needs is a lamp. Something “small and moody,” maybe, for his guest bathroom, he says. He wouldn’t mind finding more art and mirrors for the walls, he adds, plus a few potted plants to make his outdoor space look “more wild.”
White, 32, and I meet at the Los Angeles furniture shop Den, an interiors store that sells tasteful, low-slung couches and minimalist 20th-century wooden tables. “They have very expensive furniture,” he explains. White discovered the store on Instagram, when it posted a photo of sleek Scandinavian bunk beds that he ended up buying for his two daughters, Ezer, five, and Dolores, two. The transition from cot to teak Børge Mogensen bunk beds – an immutable sign of his children growing up – was devastating for White. “I knew it was going to be emotional, but I didn’t quite understand,” he says. “I was on my knees taking these fucking cribs out of the room.” In the midst of his sadness, “dealing with all these memories,” he says, his eldest daughter bounded in like it was Christmas morning. She had only one note: “Obviously we’re going to paint it pink.” This is how White’s days go now: painfully ripping away the old to make way for the fancy new furniture of his life.
Den is a uniquely Los Angeles store in that nearly everything in it was previously owned by, or will be sold to, a high-profile individual. But in LA-speak, it would be gauche to say they’re simply “famous” – so instead, they’re “fun”, “cool”, or just old-fashioned “wealthy”. White asks one of several store associates flitting around about a Mah Jong sofa he’d seen on a previous visit. “Did somebody really fun buy that?” he asks. They confirm that an unnamed “cool lady” took it home for her kids to have sleepovers on. White himself, of course, is now the type of fun person who will become part of the store’s lore.
I first met White last year, shortly after he hit the NOS button on his career. For 11 seasons, he had worked steadily on a well-known comedy drama, a remake of a British sitcom for the US channel Showtime. He followed that with the rarest of roles: lead in a critically acclaimed TV series that made him, almost overnight, a huge star. (I’ve agreed not to mention the names of either of those shows; when we speak, the Hollywood actors union SAG-AFTRA, of which White is a member, is striking over a contract dispute with major studios, and White cannot talk about projects affected.) At the time of our last conversation, White was still in the lift to superstardom, choosing between a quartet of A24 scripts and being regaled by actors he’d grown up admiring. He’d heard from a friend that Dustin Hoffman, someone White had idolised, wanted to write to him. Almost exactly a year later, White has officially arrived in the A-lister penthouse: one of those scripts is now an actual film, and Hoffman’s note reached him well, thanks.
But White’s newfound success has coincided with a dramatically overhauled personal life. In May, his wife of more than three years, the actor Addison Timlin, filed for divorce. That, combined with White’s recent physical transformation – his arms are the approximate size of bazookas – has meant that he suddenly finds himself hounded by paparazzi wherever he goes. At the most difficult time, his life has become suddenly and wrenchingly public. “It’s been insane,” White says, when I ask how his year’s gone. “A lot of high highs, a lot of terribly low lows.”
He crouches down to examine a headboard, apparently commissioned in 1951 by a Spanish family who made their fortune in sweets.
“I just have to ask how much it is, for fun,” he says, thumbing one of the headboard’s 11 light switches.
It’s $80,000.
“Woo!” White shouts. “We got to stop touching it.”
He doesn’t take long to decide on a miniature lantern that looks like a shrunken-down old-fashioned oil lamp, radiates a soft, perfectly moody orange glow, and costs $383. When making these changes, it’s important to stick to the plan, White says, as we leave the shop and make our way to the East Hollywood seafood place Found Oyster. “If I didn’t have something in my head, we would’ve been in trouble,” he says. “I would’ve bought that headboard. I’d be fucked.”
There’s a route that White likes to go jogging along near his house. On certain occasions, when the conditions are right, the endorphins spike and the runner’s high pushes him up a long hill. In July, he was having one of those good days when a car pulled up alongside him and started taking pictures, from the top of the hill all the way back to his house.
“I was like, ‘What are we doing? Are you escorting me?’” White recalls asking the photographer, attempting to reason with him.
“ ‘I’m just trying to get a good shot,’” the paparazzo demurred, according to White. “It’s such a weird aspect of this thing that I truly never thought I would ever deal with whatsoever,” he tells me, once we’re at the restaurant. “It’s not fun, and it’s not nice, and it’s really weird.”
White’s movements are treated like a matter of national security. On celebrity gossip sites like TMZ and Just Jared, even his most mundane moments now become headlines: he’s “Taking a Post-Lunch Walk”, “Starting Off His Week With a Run,” and “Out Running Errands”. (And the much more invasive, too: “Locking Lips With [model] Ashley Moore.”)
“They know where I live,” White says. “There was a period where they were just chilling and when I would pull out [of the driveway], they would follow, and when I got home they were there.” Most of the time, the paparazzi only stalked him completing innocuous errands, but it sometimes verged into uncomfortably personal territory, such as when they staked out his daughter’s football game, which he attended with Timlin.
Again, White says, he tried to reason with them: “ ‘Please don’t take pictures of our children. That’s not OK.’” One photographer replied that if he left, there were plenty of others camped out to get the shots. The paparazzi were particularly big fans of this youth football league, which other celebrities’ children also play in.
Desperate to discourage the tabloids, White started wearing the same outfit to every game: “Ratty black shirt, Adidas slides, my [Mets] cap I wear every day,” he explains. He’s wearing the cap today, pulled down over his dishevelled mop of hair, although he’s swapped the ratty shirt and slides for a khaki Ralph Lauren button-up and fresh all-white Nike Cortez trainers.
The thinking behind the uniform was that the press would get tired of printing the same images, and wouldn’t be able to run them. “They did kind of stop,” White says. (Other actors, such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Radcliffe, have famously also thwarted photographers this way.)
Private spaces are no longer safe either. White was a regular at Wi Spa, a Korean day spa in Los Angeles, where attendees typically have to strip down in order to use hot tubs and saunas. Once, White was standing there completely naked when someone, also totally nude, approached him to ask if his agents had shown him a particular script. (White doesn’t go to Wi Spa any more.)
The outside world was buzzing with vultures but inside, sitting idly with his phone, was OK, right? Wrong. In August, a story bubbled up so seemingly scandalous that it generated another massive round of headlines, such as this one from E!: “Jeremy Allen White Has a Shameless Reaction to Alexa Demie’s Lingerie Photo Shoot.” Curious, I clicked through to see what the hysteria was about. On an image of Demie’s Calvin Klein campaign, White had commented simply, “Wow.” White explains that it was totally innocent: he left it on the Instagram account belonging to photographers Inez and Vinoodh, and it was meant as a compliment on the shoot.
After the mess of stories, White says he called his publicist. “I was like, ‘I just need to shut the fuck up. I just shouldn’t say anything,’” he remembers. “And she was like, ‘Kind of.’”
At Found Oyster, we find a table and sit down to order. White is in a period of not drinking, so we wash down razor clams and salmon crudo with Arnold Palmers.
So, what’s the not-worst thing about being famous? I ask.
“Getting a reservation at a restaurant, that’s a good one,” he says without hesitation. There are a few other perks, such as being able to call up experts when prepping for roles, or having run-ins with actors he’s always admired.
In February, for example, White was in the car on the way to the SAG Awards, where he was nominated (and won) in the category of Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series. He took his mum as his date. On the way there, White noticed she was agitated. “Who are you so nervous about?” he asked her. “Who could come up to you and really shake you?” Um, Cate Blanchett, she replied. White responded as one would to anyone nervous about meeting Lydia Tár: “You’re not going to meet Cate Blanchett!”
So, of course, they arrive and get in the growing line for the red carpet. About a dozen people in front of White and his mum is Blanchett. But even then, what are the chances? “Then she locks eyes with me,” White remembers. Blanchett immediately made her way over to White only to find his mum “crying real tears,” he says. Blanchett very sweetly consoled Mama White, then outed herself as a fan of her son. “I’m like, ‘You must have better things to do [than watch me],’” White says. (“One can tell so much by meeting an actor’s family, and to meet Jeremy and his mother simultaneously was a godsend,” Blanchett told me in an email. She is now a producer on one of White’s upcoming films. “I can only thank his mother Eloise for creating this opportunity.”)
Meeting actors he admires and finding out the feeling is mutual is now commonplace for White. Over the past two years, all eyes have been on him. Or all the right eyes, he says – the kind that, in Hollywood, can dictate the trajectory of your career. The natural progression for a rising talent, after being offered A24 scripts, is a meeting with Marvel, the all-powerful Disney studio, which, over the last decade, has become like a villain in one of its own movies, seemingly set on sucking every rising talent into its universe. The machine is now so big that starring in one now feels like a foregone conclusion for actors at White’s level. (The first question Riz Ahmed asked, according to White, when they met: “When are you going to do a Marvel thing?”)
“I had a meeting for a kind of Marvel-y movie, and I had an attitude,” White tells me. “I think I played it all wrong.” White was sceptical, and showed it in front of the execs. “ ‘Tell me about why should I do your movie,’” White says, recreating the meeting now at Found Oyster, crossing his arms and leaning back, the table set with enough seafood to fill out the entire cast of The Little Mermaid. “They were like, ‘Fuck you,’” White says. “And I was like, ‘Right on.’”
During both our meetings, White expressed scepticism towards superhero flicks. “I am confused at how the pinnacle of an actor’s career has ended up in that place,” he said last year, doing his best Martin Scorsese impression. That stance has softened slightly over the last 12 months. “They get really good filmmakers to do those movies and obviously they get really good actors to do those movies,” White says now, diplomatically. White isn’t sure he should be burning bridges at this stage of his career but he doesn’t regret it, either. “I played it the way I wanted to play it.”
But the point of being this in demand is being able to take a fuck off from blockbuster studio execs in your stride. White says he is much more interested in the “$25 million drama that I think most actors want to make” – the same type of movie Marvel has nearly made extinct. But they’re not totally obsolete, and White’s new stature means he can latch onto one of the few films in that category still getting made.
In October of last year, White flew to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, to film The Iron Claw, a new project from artsy mid-budget studio A24. (A24 is also union-friendly – many of its films, including The Iron Claw, received an exemption from SAG-AFTRA for agreeing to its terms, which means White is able to promote the film). The Iron Claw follows the story of the Von Erich dynasty, a family of wrestlers in the sport’s ’80s heyday of mullets and ’roided-out villains. The Von Erich family was marred by tragedy; five of the six brothers died before they turned 34.
The Iron Claw was a different world for White, who grew up in Brooklyn. His parents both did theatre in New York’s Upper West Side. (They met, White tells me, when his dad attended one of his mum’s plays.) Rather than play sport, White trained as a dancer. He was a theatre nerd through and through. The set of The Iron Claw, in contrast, was a frat house. “Doing that movie was so bro-y in the best way,” he says.
White and his co-stars, Zac Efron and Harris Dickinson, were tasked with putting on a cartoonish amount of weight in order to play beefy ’80s wrestlers. The trio spent nearly all their time in Baton Rouge doing one of two activities: eating and working out. “Jeremy is the fucking man,” Efron told me in an email. “His presence is electric on and off camera. He motivated me to take the role as seriously as possible; we pushed each other to be better both on and off set.”
Sean Durkin, who directed the film, remembers arriving on set once to find music blasting from a makeshift tent, where he found White, Efron and Dickinson lifting weights together and taking cold plunges. “They were embodying actual wrestlers,” he says. White especially took to it. “He could wrestle professionally,” Durkin says. “He had this natural ability that our wrestling coaches said was just really, really rare.”
White plays Kerry Von Erich, the most charismatic of the brothers, who competed briefly as “The Texas Tornado” in what is now known as the WWE. White gained 9kg for the role, an uncomfortable amount of weight at his 5ft 7in height. “I’m a short king,” White affirms, after I correct his initial description of himself as “not a tall man.” At that size, building so much muscle was uncomfortable. Simply moving around was harder; his neck disappeared, engulfed by his newly monstrous traps. The mission wasn’t just to look muscular, White says, “it has to look gnarly.” The best compliment the actors on The Iron Claw could give one another was, “ ‘Yo, you’re looking big,’” White says. The set overflowed with brahhomie.
For White, though, the physical transformation was hardly the most daunting aspect of the project. “I had never played a real person before,” White says. “And it’s so frightening, because someone’s life is being investigated.” Before the real-life Kerry Von Erich died by suicide in 1993, he had two daughters, Hollie and Lacey. Both came to The Iron Claw set. “That was really scary for me,” White says. Of course, White now knows better than most what it’s like to have your life served up for public consumption.
I noticed the difference between the White I met last year and the one who executed a perfect bro-hug greeting when we met in early October: he seemed happy. Or, at least, for an actor who constantly wears an expression that says his dog just died, not sad.
In September 2022, as White was telling me what drew him to roles – the ones he now gets to cherry-pick out of Hollywood’s treasure chest – the thing he looked for was loneliness. “I feel very close to it all the time,” he said then.
But today, as he gets up to take a cigarette break, White explains that he stopped searching for that emotion. He had to. “It just feels bad,” he says. “I’m not a method actor, but what I do try to do is stay close to a feeling that I think is appropriate. And if your character’s miserable all the time and you’re trying to stay really close to something that’s very scary and isolating and misunderstood, then is there a little bleed over? Sure. I’m trying to trick myself into thinking I’m more like this person than I actually am. Sometimes you can get pretty good at tricking yourself, and that can be a bummer.”
The answer surprised me. White navigated one of the most difficult passages of his life during what should have been a joyous time, and it all played out in public at a scale he’d never experienced before. Sometimes, White wonders if he did it all wrong. In his early 20s, he watched enviously as friends of his decamped to fabulous and exotic locales while he stuck around Los Angeles to shoot a sitcom. Now, he is flush with opportunities to bounce around the globe for roles, but “I had the dream job of somebody starting a family in their 30s when I was 18,” he says.
Still, I tell him, he seems like he’s in a better place. “When we last met, I think that was the beginning of what’s been going on in my personal life,” he says. “So that’s when I was rocked the hardest and it’s taken me a year to find some footing again, I guess.”
So, the next few roles are going to be happier?
“No,” White assures me with a smile, “they’re still bummers.”
While shooting The Iron Claw, White worked nonstop for several months, flying back and forth between the US and Canada. But all that work inevitably meant losing out on time with his family. “Leaving your kids at all is brutal,” he says. “Man, I miss my kids. It’s harsh.”
But with those projects now wrapped and the strike leaving Hollywood in limbo, White is doing what very few actors get to do: taking a break. “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 says. “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.” (He would have made an exception for Steven Spielberg, he says. “I don’t think he’s going to be knocking.”)
So, as well as working on the house, he bought an ice cream maker for his kids. “This summer we went crazy. And I have a waffle maker now, so I can make cones,” he says. “Ice cream runs the world in my house.”
What White really wants to do is return to his original dream, the one he had before he started landing big, time-consuming TV roles. As a young restless actor, he always imagined himself making a career for himself on Broadway. TV halted those dreams, but now he hopes to return to New York City to see if it’s what he still wants to do. “I guess I just want to see what it feels like,” he says. He’s already in early talks with potential productions that would kick off in early 2025.
White uses his own form of Hollywood maths to calculate how many years of relevance he’s squirrelled away. Last September, he figured he’d bought himself a year or two. But his Golden Globe, SAG and Critics’ Choice awards, bagged earlier this year and all for the same role, equal another couple of years of sticking on the radar, he says. “I’m just buying myself more time and being able to do what I really love to do. And that’s very much how I view these things,” he says. It’s enough time to take a breath. Kinda. In Hollywood, whenever your career is in a good place, typically TMZ is just around the corner.
As we linger over the remaining razor clams, White reckons it is a good thing he reached superstardom when he did. “I do have a theory about when people become tremendously famous, getting stuck a little bit at that age. You just live there for a while,” he pauses. “Maybe not forever, but for a period of time.” White, on the other hand, is now going through the opposite problem: too much change. But then, sometimes moving furniture around can feel disruptive, until things settle and you find there’s something exciting in the new shape of things. Den, the furniture store, needed to keep the new lamp for a little while, to rewire it. White will pick it up in a few days, changed and better off.
Styled by Michael Darlington
Grooming by KC Fee
Set Design by Natalie Falt
Casting by In Search Of
Production by Petty Cash
Models: Alec Fry, August Gonet, Brandon Good, Tim Gripp, Sergio Perdomo, Roann
