It Appears The R-Rated ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Be The Sauciest Movie The Decidedly Un-Saucy Christopher Nolan Has Ever Made

Christopher Nolan movies do love — sometimes. Memento and Inception feature dead wives who haunt their heroes. There’s a tragic love triangle in The Dark Knight and a tragic love quadrangle in The Prestige. That’s it! What he doesn’t do is sex and/or nudity. Oppenheimer, his forthcoming film about the “father of the atomic bomb,” is going to change that. If you thought the film’s R-rating — Nolan’s first since 2002’s Insomnia — was due to graphic A-bomb carnage…well, you may be right about that. But it’s also because there’s apparently a fair amount of kink.

There’s a new profile of Cillian Murphy, who plays J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, in The Guardian (as caught by The AV Club) in which Nolan boasts about how he thinks he nailed an aspect that’s not really been played up in the film’s advertising: the love triangle between Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and his on-again-off-again mistress/ex-fiancée Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Nolan is particularly proud of that section of the film, saying it’s “as strong as I’ve ever done.”

So what makes it’s so strong Possibly because it’s so adult, especially for Nolan. The Guardian say there’s, as they put it, “prolonged full nudity” for both Murphy and Pugh, who share a sex scene. There are also “complicated” scenes with Blunt, whatever that means, but which are described as “pretty heavy.”

When asked about these scenes, Murphy turned “coy,” saying, simply, “I’m under strict instructions not to give away anything.”

So congrats to Nolan, who got to shoot his first big sex scene, which you’ll be able to see on July 21 on a double bill with the PG-13-rated Barbie.