Oppenheimerhas officially arrived in theaters and audiences are lovingChristopher Nolan’s new biopic, which tells the story of the man behind one of the most devastating weapons humanity has ever created. The director is known for paying a great deal of attention to detail when it comes to the films he creates, prioritizing the characters on the screen and their development over the heavy action sequences he includes in his stories. During an interview with Collider’sSteve Weintraubprior to the SAG-AFTRA strike,Cillian Murphy, the man who will play J. Robert Oppenheimer in the feature, spoke about how Nolan was on set, saying:
“He is brilliant with actors, understands actors, loves actors, really believes in actors and what they can bring to the story and to the character. So an awful lot of the time we’ll just find it. We’ll be shooting, but we’ll be finding the scene, and he’ll let us experiment and explore stuff. Then he may come in, and he’ll just whisper very quietly in your ear. Generally, the notes are very precise and succinct and brief, but they can totally spin the performance. That’s his genius. It also comes from the fact that he’s written it, so he has direct access to it, but he’s phenomenal, like really phenomenal.”
The movie specifically focuses on the process he went through to create the first nuclear weapons seen on the planet. Based on the book byKai BirdandMartin J. Sherwin,Oppenheimerattempts to show how a human being was capable ofcreating a devicethat took the life of so many others, in a gripping drama involving a race against time. Through the use of practical effects instead of CGI, Nolan will bring a controversial piece of history to the screen for viewers to witness one of the most relevant historical occurrences of the last century.
Florence Pughjoins Murphy as Jean Tatlock, who had a romantic connection with Oppenheimer around the time that the nuclear weapons were in the process of being created. Keeping in line with the historical aspect of the movie,Tom Contiwill portray Albert Einstein andRobert Downey Jr.stars as Lewis Strauss, a naval officer at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission who had a crucial role in the development of Oppenheimer’s project. As Nolan usually does when developing his movies, he assembled an all-star cast to tell a story that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
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Christopher Nolan’s Previous Film
A couple of years before he began work onOppenheimer, Nolan directedTenet, a science-fiction adventure about mercenaries that would discover technology that could change the course of history. StarringJohn David WashingtonandRobert Pattinson, the film showed the main protagonists trying to deal with the consequences of billionaires getting their hands on machines that could reverse the proper flow of time, blurring the line between the past and the present.Tenetpremiered in theaters on June 11, 2025, and became one of the few major releases to hit the big screen that year.
Oppenheimeris in theaters now. Check out our full interview with Murphy below:
