Gary Oldman Will Reunite With Christopher Nolan For One Scene In Oppenheimer

It's official: If you're a white cis-male actor in Hollywood, you're required to join the cast of Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer." But all kidding aside, Nolan's upcoming biographical film about the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" is stacked with top-notch acting talent, with Nolan's own secret weapon, Cillian Murphy, leading the way as J. Robert Oppenheimer. It also turns out the movie will serve as a reunion for Nolan and Gary Oldman, the latter of whom portrayed James Gordon in the writer-director's Dark Knight trilogy, starting with "Batman Begins" in 2005.

Oldman dropped this unexpected news in an interview on the UK radio station TalkSport, revealing that he's due to make a trip to the "Oppenheimer" set in the near future. The Oscar-winner quickly clarified that he's only got a small role to play in the film, stating, "I have one day [of shooting], one scene, a page and a half [of the script]."

Nolan is both writing and directing "Oppenheimer," which adapts the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction 2005 book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" by author Kai Bird and the late historian Martin J. Sherwin. Oldman and Murphy — who played Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka Scarecrow, in all three of Nolan's Batman movies — are joined in the film's cast by a number of Nolan's other past collaborators, including the pair's "Dark Knight Rises" co-star Matthew Modine. Also onboard: Matt Damon, who played a key supporting role in Nolan's sci-fi epic "Interstellar. On top of that, the cast features James D'Arcy and newly-minted Oscar-winner Kenneth Branagh, who shared scenes with D'Arcy in Nolan's previous WWII film, "Dunkirk," and played the vicious, James Bond-style villain Andrei Sator in the filmmaker's sci-fi thriller "Tenet." And let's not forget David Dastmalchian, who got his big acting break portraying one of Joker's thugs in "The Dark Knight."

Strap in, though, we've only just begun to list off the actors set to appear in "Oppenheimer." The movie's cast also includes Robert Downey Jr., Rami Malek, Benny Safdie (of Safdie Brothers fame), and Josh Hartnett, as well as Alden Ehrenreich ("Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Dane DeHaan ("Chronicle"), Jack Quaid ("The Boys"), Matthias Schweighöfer ("Army of the Dead"), David Krumholtz ("10 Things I Hate About You"), and Josh Peck ("The Wackness"). And yes, there are, in fact, women in this film's cast (two of 'em, even!), with Emily Blunt playing J. Robert Oppenheimer's fellow scientist and partner-in-marriage, Katherine Oppenheimer, and Florence Pugh starring as Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and physician who was romantically involved with Mr. Oppenheimer.

Is it an extremely white, mostly cis-male cast? Very much so. Does "Oppenheimer" sound intriguing? Also very much so! You can check it out for yourselves when it hits theaters on July 21, 2023.