Florence Pugh, Rami Malek join Nolan’s epic ‘Oppenheimer’

Film director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic about the father of the A-bomb continues to attract Hollywood’s A-list. Florence Pugh, Rami Malek and Benny Safdie have become the latest addition to the cast of the star-studded feature, reports Hollywood Reporter.

The trio joins Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy for the Nolan’s biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, which is set up at Universal Pictures.

Nolan’s film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’ by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Murphy will star as Oppenheimer, with Malek playing a scientist, Pugh appearing as Jean Tatlock, a Communist Party member who has a love affair with Oppenheimer, and Safdie starring as Edward Teller, a physicist involved in the Manhattan Project.

Rami Malek, is coming off a villainous turn in James Bond movie ‘No Time to Die’, which, with a tally of $765 million, is the highest-grossing American movie of the year. The actor, who won an Oscar for his turn as Freddie Mercury in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, will next appear in David O Russell’s latest feature, an untitled drama due out next year.

Christopher Nolan wrote the script and is directing, while his creative partner and wife, Emma Thomas, is producing with Charles Roven of Atlas Entertainment.

The project is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J Sherwin. Published in 2005, the book won the Pulitzer Prize.

The studio has set a July 21, 2023, release date for Oppenheimer.