Christopher Nolan's next movie is filling out its star-studded cast – Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, and Benny Safdie are the latest actors to join the director's upcoming World War 2 thriller Oppenheimer (via The Hollywood Reporter). They join Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr.
Pugh will play Jean Tatlock, with who Oppenheimer had an on-and-off affair. She was a member of the Communist Party of the United States, which made her a security concern for the US government. Safdie is playing Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, who is known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, while all that's known about Malek's role is that he will play a scientist.
Murphy will star as Robert Oppenheimer, the man who developed the atom bomb. Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and head of the secret Los Alamos Laboratory during the war. He was heavily involved with the Manhattan Project, which is credited with developing the first nuclear weapons used to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Blunt is playing Oppenheimer's wife Katherine, while Damon is Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project. Finally, Downey Jr. will play Lewis Strauss – he was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and initiated hearings that questioned Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the US.
According to Universal, Oppenheimer is 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."
While we wait for Oppenheimer to arrive on the big screen, fill out your watch list with our picks of the other upcoming movies to get excited about in 2021 and beyond.
