An Oppenheimer actor added one of the script's most shocking lines
The actors had "tons of homework to do" to flesh out their real-life characters, Christopher Nolan said
While Oppenheimer deftly handles all of the the nuance and contradiction inherent in America’s foreign policy during World War II and The Cold War, Nolan’s biopic is clearly a deeply critical film overall. Still, in a script chock full of indictments, one singular, stunner of a line stands out above the rest. If you’ve already seen the film (as many, many people have), you probably know the one. If not, consider this your spoiler warning (and get yourself to a theater already).
The lines come in a scene where Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is meeting with a group of government officials to decide where in Japan to drop the atomic bomb. The ensuing conversation already feels way too bros-palling-around for such a heavy decision, until U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson—played by James Remar—heightens that icky feeling to cataclysmic proportions. The U.S. shouldn’t destroy Kyoto because of its culture, but also because he and his wife honeymooned there, he says. Remar delivers the line with the same level of care he’d use to describe the weather, a chilling distillation of the film’s entire project in just one sentence. It’s not just his performance that makes the moment so good, however. According to Nolan, Remar actually added the line himself (via the New York Times).
Since Oppenheimer is so singularly focused on Oppie himself, Nolan encouraged actors to “com[e] to the table with research about what their real-life counterpart had been.” “They had tons of homework to do,” he joked.
This assignment paid off in Remar’s discovery that the real Stimson had indeed taken Kyoto off the list of potential targets due to he and his wife’s happy memories there.
“I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, just add that,” Nolan said of the last-minute edit. “It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.” At least in this writer’s experience, no one in the theater did either.