David Baddiel Says Cillian Murphy Shouldn’t Have Played ‘Oppenheimer’ Because He Isn’t Jewish

In Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy was doing this thing called ‘acting’ where he pretends to be someone he’s not (you may have heard of this concept). Well according to David Baddiel this is totally unacceptable, and he’s written a whole article criticising the casting of Cillian Murphy (a non-Jew) as Oppenheimer (a real Jew).

The comedian and author wrote the following for the The Jewish Chronicle:

“Another day, another film/TV show/play in which a famous Jew is played by a non-Jew.

I have talked and written about this many times — about how it’s a question not of acting but of context: minority casting being presently dominated by the notion of authenticity, the question is why that doesn’t apply to Jews, and what that means for how people see Jews — so I shan’t rehearse it again.

But there is another, more complex issue thrown up by the casting in Oppenheimer. Any biopic on such a serious subject as the creation of the atomic bomb needs to delve deep into the psychological underpinnings of the narrative.”

Baddiel argues that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Jewish heritage and the threat posed by Nazi Germany were crucial to why he helped develop the atomic bomb. Not sure why that necessarily means the actor playing Oppenheimer should be Jewish, but he tries to explain:

“The emotional undercurrent for J Robert and Albert Einstein and the other Jews involved in trying to make this weapon before the Nazis did, was fear and desperation.

Oppenheimer does include scenes where mentions of J Robert’s heritage are present and correct, but the film lacks, perhaps because of the casting — and this is where authenticity casting, whatever you feel about it, has some artistic value — any profound sense of that ethnicity being key to who he was, the secret driver of his work at Los Alamos.”

Baddiel later concludes:

“I’ve called Oppenheimer J Robert in this article, because his first name was in fact Julius. He, however, insisted it stood for nothing, because he didn’t want people to think he was Jewish, or that Jewishness mattered much to him — and there is a sense in which Oppenheimer the movie has gone along with that. But to do so is to miss, perhaps, the deepest undercurrent of the story.”

Wait till he hears that Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh… aren’t even American! Matthew McConaughey isn’t really an astronaut, and Tom Hanks doesn’t have AIDS (as far as anyone knows). It’s really weird because I would’ve thought a comedy icon like David Baddiel would hold more reasonable views than this, but apparently not. He’s just trying to tackle the blatant lack of Jewish representation in Hollywood (lol).

Besides, I’m not sure Baddiel is really the voice we should be listening to about this sort of thing: