Rami Malek, Florence Pugh and Benny Safdie join Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

Oscar winner Rami Malek, “Black Widow” star Florence Pugh and actor-filmmaker Benny Safdie are the latest additions to “Oppenheimer”, Christopher Nolan’s next directorial project.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the three actors join previously announced cast members Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr and Matt Damon in the film.

Also Read | Get ‘First Day First Show’, our weekly newsletter from the world of cinema, in your inbox. You can subscribe for free here

The Universal Pictures project is a biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist remembered as one of the fathers of the atom bomb.

Murphy is set to star as J Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife Katherine.

Pugh will essay the role of Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party of the United States who has an off-and-on affair with Oppenheimer and was the cause of major security concerns for government officials.

Safdie will play Edward Teller, the Hungarian physicist who is known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a member of the Manhattan Project, the US research initiative that developed the first atomic bomb.

Malek will feature in the movie as a scientist.

“Oppenheimer” is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin.

Christopher Nolan will write and direct the film, while his creative partner and wife Emma Thomas will produce with Charles Roven of Atlas Entertainment.

The studio has described the film as 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”.

Nolan’s last film was “Tenet”, the 2020 globetrotting espionage film starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh and Elizabeth Debicki, among others.