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‘Oppenheimer’ stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt said Cillian Murphy skipped dinners with the cast.
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“We invited Cillian to dinner every night and he never went,” Damon said.
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Damon said Murphy “lost so much weight for the role that he just didn’t have dinner, ever”.
Matt Damon and Emily Blunt said their “Oppenheimer” costar Cillian Murphy didn’t attend cast dinners during filming because he was on a diet as part of the lead role.
“Oppenheimer,” written and directed by Christopher Nolan, centers on American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Murphy), known as the father of the atomic bomb. The high-stakes thriller is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
The cast of “Oppenheimer” features many notable stars, including Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, the title character’s biologist and wife, and Damon as Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project.
Just as scientists gathered in the middle of nowhere for their nuclear experiment, the cast and crew of “Oppenheimer” filmed in a desert designed to mimic the look of Los Alamos, New Mexico in the 1960s. 1940.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Damon and Blunt compared the experience of filming “Oppenheimer” to summer camp — except with lots of margaritas involved.
“We were in New Mexico together, so we had dinner every night,” Damon explained.
“It’s unusual for all the actors to be on location together,” Blunt said. “We were shooting in this really isolated place in the middle of the New Mexico desert and there was a hotel and we were all together. That doesn’t always happen. Normally everyone is at home or you’re shooting at home or everyone has his house and you don’t hang around.”
Due to the isolated location, the actors said there was only one restaurant in the vicinity, so the actors gathered there daily to have their meals together.
“It was the only way to get food,” Blunt said.
“It wasn’t like the kind of 24-hour restaurant,” Damon said. “It was open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was like the dining room, you walked in there and you saw everyone, so everyone ended up sitting together.”
The stars said Murphy missed those dinners with the cast due to his diet for the movie.
“We invited Cillian to dinner every night and he never went,” Damon said, Blunt adding that Murphy ate “an almond almost every night, or a little slice of apple, instead.”
“He was losing so much weight for the role that he never had dinner,” Damon said.
In previous interviews, Nolan has said he wanted Murphy, a frequent supporting actor in his films, to play the lead role immediately after writing the “Oppenheimer” draft.
Damon and Blunt previously told People magazine that the weight and “responsibility” of the role kept Murphy out of the cast’s fun activities.
“The sheer volume of what he had to take on and take on is so monumental,” Blunt said. “Of course he didn’t want to come to dinner with us.”
“He couldn’t,” Damon said. “His brain was just too full.”
“Oppenheimer” hits theaters Friday.
Read the original Insider article