‘You’d be mad to say no’: The cast of ‘Oppenheimer’ needed little convincing to come on board

Oppenheimer is opening in theaters in 10 days, so this might be the right time to get to know the movie’s seemingly endless cast of Hollywood A-listers.

Fortunately for us, Universal has just released a featurette that takes care of the problem. In it, the movie’s stars come together to celebrate not only the most ambitious biopic in the medium’s history but the acclaimed filmmaker who made it all possible.

How do you even react when you get a call from Christopher Nolan asking you to portray a character in his upcoming movie? Well, the Oppenheimer cast reacted about as predictably as you’d expect.

“If Chris Nolan calls you and says that he’d like to meet with you,” says Emily Blunt. “I don’t care what it is.”

Florence Pugh, who portrays Jean Tatlock, agrees with that sentiment: “You’d be mad to say no. I feel like that’s everybody’s answer to this.”

Oppenheimer gets into the personal life of the man who invented the atomic bomb and changed the world forever. The book will follow the events depicted in the 2005 book, American Prometheus, but Nolan himself wrote the script in a way that catered to — as Robert Downey Jr. refers to it in the featurette — his “acute vision” for the movie.

Besides Cillian Murphy leading the ensemble, and prominent characters like Emily Blunt’s Katherine Oppenheimer and RDJ’s Lewis Strauss, other cast members include Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh, and Matthew Modine, alongside two dozen more thespians.

Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21.