How Blue-Eyed Jeremy Allen White Became Brown-Eyed Bruce Springsteen in ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’

White, in his Table Manners interview, said this film was his first time wearing contacts for a role. Given the micro weights, he also needed to constantly keep his eyeballs lubricated while filming.

“It was a strange thing. There was this man who was in charge of giving me eye drops every 20 minutes, and he was a lovely man, just doing his job, but I remember having this Pavlovian response to him,” White said. “Just because I would be in the middle of something, and he had to kind of come over with the eye drops.”

According to Nelson, however, “you can kind of see people settle into themselves once they put the lenses in.” She recounted seeing White’s demeanor shift along with the hue of his eyes, “in the way he walked or his posture changed—maybe even breathing a bit differently.” Nelson added that, in general, when looking through painted lenses, the world is slightly tinged the way it would be when looking through tinted sunglasses. While filming, White would have been “looking through kind of a honey tone,” she said. Perhaps this was useful in his process of striking a nostalgic brood for the role.

Even outside of her work in Deliver Me from Nowhere, Nelson is a big proponent of brown eyes. “I’ve always loved the beautiful dark brown eye color,” said the ocularist, who compared the allure of dark irises to the innocence of a cow’s eyes. “I don’t know if the fascination with blues has kind of made me rebel against it a little.”