Josh Peck joins Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Given the way Hollywood tends to treat child actors, it’s cool when you can follow a young person’s career over years and years until they get a real grown-up break, which is exactly what’s happening with Josh Peck. After starring on Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh with Miranda Cosgrove and nobody else as a kid, he’s had some big TV roles (like on Disney+’s Turner & Hooch, Fox’s Grandfathered, and Hulu’s How I Met Your Father), Peck has now joined the star-studded cast of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—meaning he now counts as one of the stars studding Nolan’s atomic bomb movie. Good for him!

Variety says Peck is playing Kenneth Bainbridge, the Manhattan Project scientist who said “Now we are all sons of bitches” when they tested Trinity, the first nuclear weapon. That’s such a grimly iconic quote that it’s gotta be a trailer line, right? Either that or J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” which is a little more melodramatic.

What matters is that there are two famous things that Manhattan Project scientists said when they saw the terrible thing they created, and Josh Peck gets to play the guy who said one of them. (Though there is a chance neither famous quote will be said in the movie, which would be a bit of a waste, but Nolan has earned some trust that he knows what he’s doing.)

The other guy, the titular Oppenheimer, is played by Cillian Murphy. The rest of the cast includes Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt. Oppenheimer is Nolan’s first movie away from his former BFF Warner Bros. in a very long time, with Universal eagerly agreeing to foot the bill for the feature, and it will be available in theaters—and only theaters, given the reason Nolan ditched Warner Bros.—on July 21, 2023.