Because he didn't have enough big names in his latest film already, Christopher Nolan has added three more actors to Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh, Rami Malek and Benny Safdie are all now part of the movie, which stars Cillian Murphy as the controversial scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped developed the atomic bomb during World War II.
Nolan has set the film up at Universal, and it promises "an epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it."
Pugh will be Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party of the United States who has an off-and-on affair with Oppenheimer and was the cause of major security concerns for government officials, while Safdie is Edward Teller, the Hungarian physicist who is known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a member of the Manhattan Project, the US research initiative that developed the atomic weapon. Malek is playing one of the scientists on the project.
Alongside Murphy, there's Matt Damon as Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife, Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the infamous chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who initiated hearings that questioned Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States and famously had the scientist’s security clearance revoked.
The film is set for a 21 July, 2023 release.