Which Supporting Characters in Oppenheimer Will Die of Radiation Poisoning?

Which Supporting Characters in Oppenheimer Will Die of Radiation Poisoning?,Let’s go one by one down the 70-person cast list of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer,’ from Cillian Murphy through Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, until we find the most likely suspects.

Which Supporting Characters in Oppenheimer Will Die of Radiation Poisoning?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, if you’re going to make a movie about nuclear physicists, one of them must eventually fall victim to a lab accident that causes them to die an excruciating death by radiation poisoning. If in the course of this accident, they heroically sacrifice themselves to save their fellow scientists, all the better.

However, standing between Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Oppenheimer and the obligatory radiation-poisoning death scene is the same historical fact that has bedeviled all other depictions of the Manhattan Project: The only two such occurrences at Los Alamos, the tragic deaths of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, happened after the bomb had already been dropped.

This will not do. How else can a filmmaker represent the terrible dawn of the atomic age than by showing the devastating effects of radiation on a single American scientist? (Before you say, “What about the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians?,” sorry, that’s not allowed.)

–>

The 1989 movie Fat Man and Little Boy got around this issue by killing off a fictional character, John Cusack’s Michael Merriman, who was loosely based on Slotin. Could Oppenheimer do the same? Let’s go down the 70-person cast list one by one, crossing off the people who canonically did not die of radiation poisoning, until we find the most likely suspects.

Assorted middle-aged men in suits.Photo: Universal Pictures

Lyall Johnson (Jack Cutmore-Scott), Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), Henry Stimson (James Remar), George C. Marshall (Will Roberts), James Byrnes (Pat Skipper), and James Conant (Steve Coulter)U.S. government employees of varying ranks: Johnson was a lowly security officer; Marshall was secretary of state. What they all have in common is that none of them died of radiation poisoning.

With them, we’ve come to the end of all the named characters in the Oppenheimer credits, all of whose deaths are accounted for. Could it be that Oppenheimer will somehow not include the obligatory movie scene of a scientist dying in a lab accident? Perhaps! However, the movie’s credits also include a handful of characters who lack proper names. Let’s run through them quickly to see if any of them are candidates.

Senate Aide (Alden Ehrenreich), Counsel (Scott Grimes), and Congressman (Jeff Hephner)These guys also seem like they come from the 1950s scenes. They’re safe! (Sidenote: Five years ago, Ehrenreich was the future of Star Wars. Now he’s playing an unnamed character in the framing device of a Christopher Nolan film. Time moves fast in Hollywood.)

Dutch Student (Petrie Willink)He’s listed in the section with people Oppenheimer met as a young man traveling Europe, so I think he’s probably safe as well.

AAF Officer (Jeremy John Wells), Weatherman (Sean Avery), Army Captain (Adam Kroeger), Soldier (Drew Kenney), and AAF Officer 2 (Bryce Johnson)Every World War II movie needs guys like this. I don’t expect any of them will have the screen time to die in a nuclear accident.

Burn Victim (Flora Nolan)A possibility from the name alone, until you realize she’s being played by Nolan’s college-age daughter.

Laughing Woman (Kerry Westcott), Kissing Woman (Christina Hogue), Kissing Man (Clay Bunker), Weeping Man (Tyler Bearsley), and Consoling Woman (Maria Teresa Zuppetta)I like to imagine these characters will all appear together in the summer’s weirdest sex scene.

Presidential Aide (Kate French)Next!

Concerned Scientist (Brett Delbuono)If Oppenheimer is going to make a supporting character die of radiation poisoning, it all comes down to this guy.