Christopher Nolan's upcoming film 'Oppenheimer' explores the life and morally dubious achievements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist credited with developing the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was the director of Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bombs were actually put together, and one of the main contributors to the Manhattan Project, a government research project that ran from 1942 to 1946 and was focused on developing nuclear weapons.
'Oppenheimer' is played by Cillian Murphy, who is securing the lead for the first time in a Christopher Nolan film. Having previously starred in 'Inception,' 'Batman Begins,' 'The Dark Knight,' 'The Dark Knight Rises,' and 'Dunkirk,' Murphy has been a mainstay in many of Nolan's movies.
Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, Emily Blunt plays Kitty Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss
In an interview with a leading publication Murphy, who has been strictly instructed to not give away any crucial plot details confirmed that the film "features prolonged nudity" for Murphy and Florence Pugh, who plays Oppenheimer’s ex-fiancee, as well as sex, and there are complicated scenes with Emily Blunt, who plays his wife. He described them as "pretty heavy."
Speaking about chemistry tests done ahead of filming these scenes, Murphy added, “They put two actors in a room to see if there’s any spark, and have all the producers and director at a table watching. I don’t know what metric they use, and it seems so outrageously silly, but sometimes you get a chemistry and nobody knows why.”
The star-studded cast also includes Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Peck, Jason Clarke, David Dastmalchian, Alex Wolff, James D'Arcy, and many others.
The biographical book 'American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer' by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin, which was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, served as the inspiration for the movie. The film will be out on July 21, 2023.
