Oppenheimer is filled with famous faces — but some of the hardest roles to cast were the many scientists working for Cillian Murphy’s Robert J. Oppenheimer. Writer-director Christopher Nolan wanted people who not only looked period accurate for the 1940s, but understood the science behind the atomic bomb.
Luckily, casting agency Alessi Hartigan Casting specializes in hard-to-cast extras. Co-founders Sande Alessi and Shayne Hartigan embraced Nolan’s many requirements.
“No dyed hair, no hair that goes past your shoulders,” Hartigan recalls. “Women would have to come with rollers every morning in their hair ready to go. Men, no tattoos, unless we could cover them.”
No piercings were allowed beyond single studs, and people’s eyebrows couldn’t be overplucked. The period specifications were so tight that women couldn’t even have highlights.
“Another important factor is they can’t have Botox and filler. We could look at someone and say, ‘Oh my God, she’s perfect, but she’s got so much lip filler and it doesn’t look period,’” Alessi says.
“Christopher Nolan’s vision was very, very specific,” she adds. “Just as we spoke about plastic surgery on your face, you couldn’t have plastic surgery on your body either, or you couldn’t have an overly muscular-looking body. It was not just faces that we were casting, it was also body types.”
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Alessi has been doing casting since the 1990s, with credits including Minority Report, The Truman Show, Fight Club, Catch Me If You Can, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Argo, The Social Network, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. She met Shayne Hartigan when he came on as an intern to help run a casting call in Hawaii for background extras for 2017’s Kong: Skull Island.
“Shayne swooped in and just naturally took it over and was incredible. So I had to keep him forever,” Alessi smiles.
Together, they formed Alessi Hartigan Casting in January 2020. Since then, they’ve cast background extras for Barbie, Dune, Flamin’ Hot, Black Adam, and more.
“We have a reputation of doing specialty casting. We’re both members of the Casting Society of America, which is not something that you find in extras casting directors. So we’re both actual principal casting directors as well, but we specialize in extras. The shows that we specialize in are period shows where there are hard-to-find type people,” Alessi says.
Casting Real Scientists for Oppenheimer
For Oppenheimer, Hartigan estimates that in any given scene using extras, between a quarter and half of the background actors were real scientists.
To find these incredibly specific-looking people — who were also real-life scientists — Alessi and Hartigan put out open casting calls in both Santa Fe and the actual town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Los Alamos Laboratories, which Oppenheimer directed during World War II, is still in operation.
“These people were coming in being like, ‘Hey, well, I can’t tell you what I do. Here’s my card,’” Hartigan recalls. “They were like, ‘Yeah, I actually work at the labs. And while I can’t tell you what I do, I’d love to be a part of your show.’”
He adds: “It was great, because so many of them were active scientists. We saw a lot of retired scientists who actually worked in and around the Manhattan Project at that time. A lot of folks that were in their 80s and 90s came by just to say hi,” he says.
They were able to learn a lot about what the era was really like at Los Alamos from the open call.
“People were bringing in clothing from that time period to be like, ‘Look, this was my uniform,’ or ‘This is what I was doing at that time frame,’” Hartigan says. “Then we’d get random emails after that being like, ‘Hey, so I actually work at Los Alamos and my friend told me you do this, and I’ve got these days off. Can I come be a part of this with you?’ So we just started working them into our mix. And really, they ended up being a huge core asset to the project and what we were doing.”
Alessi Hartigan Cast Whole Families in Oppenheimer
Because scientists were asked to bring their families to Los Alamos to help Oppenheimer complete the bomb, Alessi Hartigan enlisted whole families, too.
“We’d say, ‘What does your wife look like?’” Alessi laughs. “We needed kids too, so we’d ask everyone to get their kids involved.”
As eager as extras often are to share their experience working on a big Hollywood film, they were all asked to sign non-disclosure agreements — something commonplace among extra work — promising they wouldn’t share anything about the film on social media or take any photos of the set.
“We did have a very strict NDA, and a very strict policy when it came to the BG [background actors] about, ‘Hey, do not talk about what we’re doing. Do not talk about what you’re wearing. Do not take photos on set,’” Hartigan says. “They try to keep a lot of this as wrapped up as possible.”
Beyond finding people who looked 1940s-accurate with natural bodies and no plastic surgery or augmentation of any kind, Alessi and Hartigan had another, even more daunting task: finding extras who fit vintage costume pieces that the production already had.
“The biggest requirement is just the ability to fit into, a lot of times, these really period-accurate clothing pieces, or even true period pieces that are vintage,” Hartigan says.
The costume department tried to use real 1940s clothing whenever possible.
“If Costumes can find it without having to build it, we’re going to use it. And so if they were only able to find a size-zero dress, we’re going to have to find a size-zero female to fit that dress. And it goes both ways. We’ve had shows come to us sometimes… and they’re like, ‘We were only able to find clothes that fit 300-pound people, and it’s period.’ So we’re like, ‘Okay, then we’ll go find that,’” Hartigan says.
Alessi adds: “We might find a real scientist who was perfect, and then just couldn’t fit into the costume, which would make it really hard for us. Oh my God, you don’t even know how many times that came up. It was really, really hard, because most people are bigger now. Most people are taller than they were back then.”
It also helped if they could throw up convincingly. After the scene in which Oppenheimer gives a pep-rally-style speech to his team after the atomic bomb is dropped on Japan, he makes awkward eye contact with a scientist vomiting outside. Hartigan remembers having to tell prospective extras: “Show us your best puking face.”
“I’m sure we put them on tape,” Alessi recalls. “Some people might over-vomit. We have to see. We can’t just send them.”
Main image: Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, surrounded by his team of scientists, in Oppenheimer, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures.