Due to its subject matter, we wouldn’t be surprised if Oppenheimer went down as Christopher Nolan’s most serious and dramatic work to date, with a new interview now showing that the movie might have been so emotionally potent as to intimidate the great Robert Downey Jr. over joining the cast.
RDJ has yet to exercise the full range of his acting chops again following the release of Avengers: Endgame. Nolan’s new biopic — dealing with the invention of the atom bomb and the man sitting at the heart of mankind’s most dangerous invention — is exactly the kind of movie to bring its cast to their breaking point, and it seems that’s exactly the kind of effect it had on the Iron Man star.
Recently discussing the movie with extra alongside Cillian Murphy (who portrays the titular J. Robert Oppenheimer), RDJ said that the latest Nolan blockbuster scared him at first.
“It just, it scared me,” He said to Cillian, “Nowhere near as much as I’m sure when you first read this thing and go, ‘Oh, my God, I have to do this whole thing because Chris just called.’ But anyway, I got to experience it, and it was also nice to have the pressure off. Let this guy do the heavy lifting.”
Murphy disagreed with Downey Jr.’s assessment, but in typical RDJ fashion, the actor insisted that he was on the sidelines for this particular project:
“I’d come in like, ‘I had four days off. I was just kind of, you know, antiquing around Santa Fe. What have you been up to?’ And he’d (Murphy) be like, ‘You want to run the lines?'”
Since Oppenheimer stars almost the entire pool of acting talent in Hollywood, we can expect a lot of brilliant performances in the film, but if the trailers are anything to go by I think RDJ isn’t just being his usual humble self when he claims that illian Murphy has done most of the heavy lifting for this story.
Oppenheimer will start its theatrical run on July 21.