Emily Blunt might soon be teaming back up with her The Quiet Place Part II co-star Cillian Murphy, with Deadline reporting that the actress is in talks to co-star in Christopher Nolan’s next film, the nuclear bomb bio Oppenheimer. Blunt would reportedly take on the role of biologist and botanist Katherine Puening (later Oppenheimer), who began a relationship with the physicist shortly before he began his work on the Manhattan Project near the beginning of World War II, and who remained his wife until his death in 1967.
Katherine—known as Kitty to her friends—had a fairly fascinating life story even before you bring the whole “I am become Death” of it all into the picture; a registered Communist in the 1930s, Puening nearly joined a former husband in fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, before learning that he had been killed in the fighting. During her time at the Los Alamos research facility that created the first atomic bombs, she reportedly spent at least some of her time performing blood tests with the project’s health operatives, working to determine the effects of radioactivity on the human body.
Blunt has had a fairly busy pandemic, all things considered. Quiet Place 2, obviously, landed just as the COVID-19 lockdowns first hit, causing it to have a fairly massive gap between its premiere in early 2020 and its eventual widespread release. Since then, she’s starred in Jungle Cruise for Disney, opposite The Rock, and in John Patrick Shanley’s Wild Mountain Thyme. She’s currently filming on a new Western miniseries, The English, created by Hugo Blick.
Oppenheimer is the latest from Nolan, who appears to be stepping back, at least a little, from the Tenet-style action spectaculars that have filled his CV of late. (Not that we’re not expecting some absolutely dazzling nuke footage out of this, mind you.) Murphy is set to star in the film, continuing his long relationship with the director. This will be Blunt’s first project under Nolan’s aegis.