Meet the Real-Life Scientists Who Got to Play Scientists in ‘Oppenheimer’

Shane Fogerty and a dozen other scientists watch as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the world-famous physicist, weighs the world-changing news: The Soviets have an atomic bomb. After Oppenheimer makes the case against escalating the situation, a government official, Lewis Strauss, cuts in to disagree.

Only Oppenheimer isn’t Oppenheimer, but the actor Cillian Murphy. And Strauss is Robert Downey Jr.

Fogerty, by contrast, is a real-life physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Oppenheimer was the founding director during World War II. Along with dozens of colleagues, Fogerty jumped at the chance to bring the Manhattan Project to life as extras in the hotly anticipated Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on Friday.

Fogerty normally spends his days modeling large-scale physics simulations and running code on ultra-fast supercomputers — but truth be told, acting wasn’t much of a stretch.

“As a scientist,” Fogerty says, “I just had to be myself a little bit.”

The sci-fi epics of Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer’s writer-director, probe the nightmarish frontiers of innovation. Whether they’re hijacking dreams (Inception), traveling through wormholes (Interstellar), or going back in time (Tenet), Nolan’s pioneers grapple with moral dilemmas in lawless spaces.

Oppenheimer was not so different. Born in New York, the theoretical physicist was educated at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Göttingen, in Germany. He was rising through the ivory tower, teaching at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, when he was recruited to run a new government weapons lab in the high desert of Los Alamos, N.M.

Built in 1943, the facility code-named Project Y was so secret that its only mailing address was a post-office box in Santa Fe. Scientists and engineers flooded in from elite institutions — Princeton University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and on July 16, 1945, they detonated the first atomic bomb. The United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just weeks later, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and Japan surrendered.

The scientific achievement ended one war but raised the stakes of all future wars. Oppenheimer famously said his creation had brought to mind a line of Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

‘They Pushed the Button’

The biopic marks Nolan’s second tour of World War II, which was also the setting of 2017’s Dunkirk, and is based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Casey Affleck, Emily Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, and Florence Pugh, among many others, round out the star-studded cast.

“Oppenheimer’s story has been with me for years,” the director has said. “It’s just an incredible idea — people doing these calculations, and looking at the relationship between theory and the real world, and deciding there’s a very small possibility they’re going to destroy the entire world. And yet they pushed the button.”

Some of Oppenheimer was shot at UC-Berkeley, as well as in Princeton, N.J., where Oppenheimer directed the Institute for Advanced Study after World War II. But much of the filming took place on a replica of the lab in its boomtown days. The set was built about 40 miles north of the actual Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is a 40-square-mile campus with 16,800 employees working on nuclear weapons and other classified national-security issues. According to a lab spokeswoman, Los Alamos wasn’t involved with the production.

Still, Nolan sought to make the scenes feel authentic, down to the faces in the background. Casting calls in New Mexico early last year drew hundreds of locals, and the ads sought scientists.

“I was sure that I was not going to get a part,” says Stephen Andrews, who’s worked at Los Alamos since 2015. “I was very excited when I got a text message a few weeks later that I was chosen.” Before arriving on set, he confesses, he loved Inception, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy but did not know who’d directed them. “How is it that it’s one person that’s done all these movies?” he says.

His costume was, naturally, a white lab coat. He and other extras were also given different-colored security badges, the kind worn by Manhattan Project employees. Andrews made sure to snag a white one — white being the highest clearance.

He doesn’t enjoy the same privilege at his actual workplace, unfortunately, because he’s Canadian. “My clearance in fake Los Alamos,” he says, “is much higher than in real Los Alamos.”

In the real Los Alamos, Andrews designs computer models for weapons-related physics phenomena. In the fake Los Alamos, being a scientist meant looking at a wall of beakers, carrying one to a machine, and adjusting the dials, as Andrews did over and over for one scene. He and a colleague can be glimpsed in the trailer as Murphy, playing Oppenheimer, strides down a hallway. (At the time of these interviews, Andrews and his co-workers hadn’t seen the movie, nor had The Chronicle.)

With zero acting experience, Andrews had to channel his thespian instincts. In one scene, Murphy and Damon — who plays the government official overseeing the Manhattan Project — were walking on a road toward Andrews and other background actors.

“All the other extras are trying to be good extras and not look at the famous actors,” Andrews recalls. But he decided to stare at Damon “like an idiot, trying to see if he’ll say hi or something,” just as he does when he crosses paths with the lab’s current director, Thomas Mason. It worked. “Matt Damon would each time give me a little nod and acknowledge me,” he says.

Fixing an Equation

For the scientists, walking around a simulacrum of their workplace in its infancy was a surreal reminder of the legacy that they now carry on.

“I’m hoping that the movie will convey how much of a challenge it was for Oppenheimer to wrestle with his own mind,” says Tom Tierney, a physicist who leads a team that works on technology-nonproliferation issues. “All the researchers I work with who work in the nuclear-weapons arena, they all take that very seriously, that this is a grave weapon that should never, ever have to be used.”

Scientists aren’t strangers to long hours, but even they were surprised by how much labor goes into making movie magic. Days could start as early as 5 a.m. and wrap around midnight. The extras were also wowed by the giant cameras and prolific amount of film stock used to shoot the $100-million movie. With a marathon running time of three hours and nine minutes, the highest-resolution IMAX print of Oppenheimer spans 11 miles and weighs 600 pounds.

“I never appreciated how much effort goes into a good film like that,” says Tierney, a 26-year employee of Los Alamos.

When the cameras weren’t rolling, the real and make-believe scientists got to know one another. Andrews overheard Benny Safdie, who stars as the hydrogen-bomb inventor Edward Teller, deep in conversation with a researcher who designs cosmic-ray detectors. Now a director as well as an actor, Safdie started out at Oberlin College as a physics student “obsessed with dark matter.” “The two of them for the whole morning were chatting about detector design,” Andrews says.

Fogerty stepped into his scene, which was set in a smoke-filled hotel room, assuming that he wouldn’t say a word to the actors. To his delight, they bombarded him with questions. “I was at times giving lectures on the origin of the moon,” says the astrophysics Ph.D. “Robert Downey Jr. was debating with me about the prospects for nuclear fusion.”

He was asked by Matthew Modine, who plays the military scientist Vannevar Bush, how the experience compared to a normal workday. “It’s exactly like this,” Fogerty quipped.

While shooting at Fuller Lodge, a historic community center in downtown Los Alamos, Nolan asked the scientists present to raise their hands. “There were a good 40 or so of us in that room,” Tierney says, adding that staff members from the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University were also in the mix. “Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy were like, ‘Wow, we had no idea that there were that many.’”

Nolan has said that the scientists made the process special. “We needed the crowd of extras to give reactions, and improvise, and we were getting sort of impromptu, very educated speeches,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It was really fun to listen to. You’ve been on sets where you’ve got a lot of extras around and they’re more or less thinking about lunch. These guys were thinking about the geopolitical implications of nuclear arms and knew a lot about it. It actually was a great reminder every day of: We have to be really on our game, we have to be faithful to the history here, and really know what we’re up to.”

Some of that expertise even made it on screen. When Tierney and a colleague saw an incorrect equation scrawled on a chalkboard, they couldn’t resist fixing it. “It was a simple Maxwell equation,” Tierney says, “so nothing complex.” (That’s electromagnetism, for those unaware.)

The only downside, perhaps, was that actual work piled up for a few weeks. Even so, Andrews says, he passed time on set reading research papers and trading ideas with scientists he wouldn’t normally interact with.

“It’s funny,” he says, “how much science got done on set.”