Christopher Nolan blows up his daughter in Oppenheimer
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Flora Nolan's role in her dad's upcoming film Oppenheimer was a blast. Literally.
Christopher Nolan confirmed in a recent Telegraph interview that his eldest daughter, whom he shares with wife Emma Thomas, makes an appearance in the film as a young woman whose entire face melts off in a massive nuclear explosion. Thanks, dad!
"We needed someone to do that small part of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence," he told the outlet. "So it was wonderful to just have her sort of roll with it."
The director explained that the idea to cast his daughter in the role, which was vacant at the time, came to him spontaneously while she was visiting the Oppenheimer set for a week. In the scene, the girl appears in front of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in a dramatic vision before getting absolutely eviscerated by a nuclear bomb.
"I hope you're not going to make me sound like Michael Powell on Peeping Tom," he jokingly told journalist Robbie Collin about his casting choice, referencing the 1960 horror film that saw the director's nine-year-old son play a serial killer and Powell his evil father.
Still, Nolan couldn't deny that depicting the gruesome brutality of a nuclear explosion by casually blowing up your own daughter onscreen was definitely an interesting choice.
"But yes, I mean, gosh, you're not wrong. Truthfully, I try not to analyze my own intentions," he said. "But the point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you. So I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms."
Based on the 2005 book American Prometheus, Nolan's upcoming film centers around Oppenheimer — the father of the atom bomb — and is billed 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." In addition to Flora and Murphy, the film stars Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, and more.
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