Josh Harnett joins the cast

The upcoming epic thriller based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.
Posts: 1439
Joined: October 2019
DUNKIRKIE wrote:
January 5th, 2022, 2:01 am
do you guys think he will play a military guy? given he has done great in Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor (despite it's 20 years ago), which I think are his most known work to the general audience
He will play the villain

User avatar
Posts: 4287
Joined: May 2014
Location: “Where are you?!” “HERE.”
Yesssss, my boy

User avatar
Posts: 685
Joined: November 2019
DHOPW42 wrote:
January 5th, 2022, 9:04 am
I'm not sure there are too many military roles in this film besides Groves (Matt Damon), the rest might simply be extras. I'm thinking it's either another (composite?) scientist or a relative of Oppenheimer.
My first thought was Oppenheimer's brother, he is definitely an important person in his life and for the narrative in "American Prometheus".

User avatar
Posts: 64
Joined: December 2021
Location: New Jersey

User avatar
Posts: 3402
Joined: January 2009
Josh Hartnett's role has been just confirmed by Variety:
Oppenheimer” stars Emily Blunt as biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.

Ace
Posts: 2148
Joined: November 2012
Ernest Lawrence
Josh Hartnett

When physicist Ernest Lawrence met Oppenheimer, they became immediate friends; Oppenheimer was drawn to Lawrence’s gregarious, extroverted personality.

To play Lawrence, Nolan chose Josh Hartnett, no stranger to big films that tackle the morality of war and military heroics, having played an Army pilot in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and an Army ranger in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down.

Returning to movies after taking time off to focus on raising kids, Hartnett re-engages the genre that made him a star through a different kind of character. “I knew a bit about Oppenheimer, but not Lawrence and how he was instrumental in creating nuclear weapons and what is now our 21st century dilemma,” Hartnett says. “He’s the most important and impressive historical figure from the 20th Century that I knew nothing about. He developed the cyclotron, developed the concept of big science, he basically gave birth to what is now the super-collider. Everything has changed because of this guy and his tinkering.”

Hartnett drew inspiration from his great uncle, a physicist who worked on the Gemini space program that put Americans on the moon, and the actor consumed as much research as he could find on Lawrence. “I wanted to make sure Lawrence didn’t sound contemporary, and that he was a person of his time and place,” Hartnett says. “Luckily, I come from the same place as Lawrence. He went to school in Minnesota, and I grew up in Minnesota, so I know what people sound like there. And growing up in a family with a scientific background helped me understand a guy who was steeped in academia and had been given a long leash to push the boundaries of what was possible.”

Hartnett focused his performance by emphasizing everything in Lawrence that Oppenheimer wasn’t. “One of the things I learned was that Lawrence was the kind of guy who would have been everybody’s first choice to lead the Manhattan Project. He was outgoing, he was a people person, he was good at fundraising—all these things that frankly Oppenheimer wasn’t naturally gifted at,” Hartnett says. “That helped me in getting a good perspective on the character, because the last thing I wanted to do was play Lawrence as a scientist. He’s a human being who was distinctly different than the scientists around him, most notably Oppenheimer.”

Shooting on location in New Mexico was energizing for Hartnett. “When I first started filming, a significant portion of us were staying in this little hotel, which was just a bunch of cabins lined up next to each other,” Hartnett says. “After work, everybody would just come back and eat dinner together; it felt so family-like, and so unlike movies these days. It was just this massive amount of people coming together in this tiny, little place working hard to do this important film, and yet it just felt casual and easy. It was one of the best experiences of my career.”
Oppenheimer" Production Notes

Posts: 1439
Joined: October 2019
Keep these coming!

Post Reply