This has been the summer of Barbie and Oppenheimer. While other films have done well at the box office, few have climbed to the incredible heights of the Greta Gerwig comedy, and the Christopher Nolan drama. Oppenheimer recently extended its IMAX run, because people are going out of their way to see the movie in the large-screen format that Nolan intended. And while the industry already are discussing cast members that could find their way into the still-developing awards race, Florence Pugh’s name isn’t getting tossed around as much as, say, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, or Robert Downey Jr., she might understand why … and Nolan already apologized for it.
There are two women in the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). His original love, Jean Tatlock (Pugh), and the woman he eventually married, “Kitty” Oppenheimer (Blunt). And even though Oppenheimer and Tatlock drifted apart, she would come back into his life at different times, creating real emotional conflict for the theoretical physicist. But the Jean Tatlock part in Oppenheimer wasn’t as large as some of the other roles in Nolan’s feature (and it is characterized by numerous nude scenes that have generated some censorship concerns). In an interview conducted before the SAG strike began, Pugh talked about the size of the role, and the fact that Nolan apologized for it when he offered her the part.
