MANILA, Philippines — Actor Josh Hartnett, who was a big name during the early 2000s with films like "Black Hawk Down" and "Pearl Harbor," will mark a return to blockbusters in Christopher Nolan's upcoming film "Oppenheimer."
The titular father of the atomic bomb will be played by longtime Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy with Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty. Also in major roles are Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves Jr., and Robert Downey Jr. as founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss.
Hartnett will portray pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence, who would go on to win the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the cyclotron.
Playing the peers of Hartnett's Lawrence are Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller and Michael Angarano as physicist Robert Serber.
Completing the ensemble cast are Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dan DeHaan, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich and Matthew Modine.
Nolan based his film on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin.
WATCH: Star-studded cast of "Oppenheimer"
Bird told Variety that he was stunned and emotionally recovering from seeing the completed film.
"I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues," Bird said.
Hartnett rose to fame on the crime series "Cracker," the slasher movie "Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later" and Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides."
After "Black Hawk Down" and "Pearl Harbor," his next biggest projects were "40 Days and 40 Nights," "Hollywood Homicide," "Sin City," "The Black Dahlia," "Lucky Number Slevin," "30 Days of Night" and 2008's "August."
Apart from "Oppenheimer," Hartnett will star in Guy Ritchie's "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre" and the "Beyond the Sea" episode of the newest season of "Black Mirror" this year.
"Oppenheimer" premieres in Philippine cinemas beginning July 19. — Video from Universal Pictures Philippines YouTube channel
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