Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
This will not do.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy)Well start with the easy ones.
A lifelong smoker, the real Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967 at age 62.
(Or sometimes both!)
They survived the war without being killed by rogue masses of plutonium.
He wasnt, so they didnt, and he lived until 1976.
But Groves, the general who directed the Manhattan Project, didnt die until 1970.
InOppenheimer,hes playing the real-life scientist who turned out to be spying for the Soviets.
The guy knows his throw in.
He wound up fighting in the Pacific Theater, but survived, dying of cancer in 2002.
Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh)Oppenheimers Communist ex was found dead in her apartment in 1944.
Anyway, theres enough drama to Jeans story without making nuclear physics the culprit.
She and everyone else in this section were Communists who crossed paths with Oppenheimer without dying of radiation poisoning.
Richard Tolman (Tom Jenkins) and Vannevar Bush (Matthew Modine)Science bigwigs!
She died in 1957, for reasons unrelated to the development of the atom bomb.
Lili Hornig (Olivia Thirlby)The rare woman working for the Manhattan Project.
Hornig died in November 2017 at age 96, meaning she theoretically lived long enough to seeDunkirkin theaters.
Charlotte Serber (Jessica Erin Martin)The librarian at Los Alamos; Serber died by suicide in 1967.
He lived until 2011, andOppenheimerwouldnt dare put him in New Mexico just to kill him off.
A name like David Hill?
That sounds like a fictional character.
But no Hill wasa real guytoo, who lived to 89.
What they all have in common is that none of them died of radiation poisoning.
Could it be thatOppenheimerwill somehow not include the obligatory movie scene of a scientist dying in a lab accident?
However, the movies credits also include a handful of characters who lack proper names.
Lets run through them quickly to see if any of them are candidates.
(Sidenote: Five years ago, Ehrenreich was the future ofStar Wars.
Now hes playing an unnamed character in the framing machine of a Christopher Nolan film.
Time moves fast in Hollywood.)
I dont expect any of them will have the screen time to die in a nuclear accident.
Presidential Aide (Kate French)Next!
