Universal Pictures has released the first look at Oppenheimer, the upcoming Christopher Nolan-directed film based on the creator of the atomic bomb. The first image features Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the black-and-white image revealed by Variety shows Murphy’s Oppenheimer dressed in a suit with a hat over his head. A cigar dangles from his mouth, which is an accurate representation of the man who was known as a chain smoker. Oppenheimer died on February 18, 1967, after battling throat cancer. Oppenheimer has an all-star cast, with another new addition also being announced.
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Kenneth Branagh is joining the Oppenheimer cast in an undisclosed role. Branagh and Nolan are no strangers to one another, with the actor and director working together on Belfast and Tenet. Belfast scored Branagh Academy Award nominations for directing, producing, and writing. The first look also comes as Universal and Syncopy announce principal photography has begun.
The cast continues to grow, with recent additions over the last two months including The Boys star Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Dane DeHaan, Florence Pugh, and Josh Hartnett. Other members of the all-star cast includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Rami Malek, Dylan Arnold , David Krumholtz, and Alden Ehrenreich.
Opening on July 21, 2023, Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. A description from the book’s back cover can be read below:
American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.
He was the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials-an idea that is still relevant today. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force’s plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. In the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets.
We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City’s Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world’s most accomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the leading American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa into the world’s most potent nuclear weapons laboratory-and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.
