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Stranger Things star Matthew Modine joins Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer cast-list continues to grow, with the addition of Stranger Things' Matthew Modine

Matthew Modine

Every day brings another Oppenheimer casting announcement and today is no exception. It looks like Christopher Nolan is forming his own supergroup and everyone is in it. The latest addition is Matthew Modine – star of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket – and more recently, Stranger Things.

You need to take a deep breath before you can start listing everyone who has already been cast in the movie based on a true story. Cillian Murphy has been cast in the titular role – of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the head of the secret weapons laboratory in the Manhattan Project. They developed the atomic bombs which were unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending the second world war.

Matt Damon plays a General and Robert Downey Jr plays Lewis Strauss – the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The slightly younger actors who have been cast – Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie, Dane DeHaan and Jack Quaid are likely to make up the team of scientists and engineers who worked with Oppenheimer.

Emily Blunt plays Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine (Kitty) – who was an exceedingly interesting figure in her own right – being German, a communist, and a renowned scientist. Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, another figure who lived a fascinating life. She was Oppenheimer’s girlfriend before Kitty, and a psychiatrist and communist.

We don’t yet know what role Matthew Modine is playing in Oppenheimer, but due to his age, it it likely to be someone with a leadership role or an authority figure. Modine has been acting since the 1980s, in roles such as Birdy with Nicolas Cage, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and Married to the Mob. His 1990s roles include Memphis Belle and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Modine is best-known to a younger generation for his role as the sinister Martin Brenner in Netflix’s Stranger Things.

While we wait for what will surely be more names added to the ever-growing Oppenheimer cast-list, check out our guide to the best war movies to find out if Modine’s Full Metal Jacket and Nolan’s Dunkirk are there.