The cast of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer continues to grow. Drake and Josh star Josh Peck has joined the film’s expansive cast, according to Variety. Peck will play Kenneth Bainbridge, a real scientist who was part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ World War II era project that developed the first nuclear weapons. Peck is just the latest casting announcement for the film which also recently announced the castings of The Suicide Squad star David Dastmalchian and Matthew Modine.
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The cast of Oppenheimer is a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood at this point with Cillian Murphy, Josh Hartnett, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Jack Quaid, and Dane DeHaan also set to star among others. Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the film Murphy is set to play the titular Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who was the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those credited as being “the father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons. The weapons created by the Manhattan Project were used in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Blunt is playing his wife Katherine Vissering Oppenheimer. Pugh is set to play Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party of the United States who had an affair with Oppenheimer, while Safdie will play Edward Teller, a member of the Manhattan Project considered to be the “father of the hydrogen bomb”.
Production on Oppenheimer began in late February and the film will be Nolan’s first with Universal following the end of his decades-long relationship with Warner Bros. It has been reported that Nolan’s deal with Universal gives him total creative control of the film, a $100 million budget with an equal amount to be spent on marketing, 20 percent of the first-dollar gross, a guaranteed theatrical window of 100 days, and reportedly a blackout period where the studio will not release any other movies in the three weeks preceding and following Oppenheimer‘s release.
Oppenheimer is set to opening theaters July 21, 2023.
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