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Christopher Nolan jumped at the opportunity to cast his daughter in a cameo for Oppenheimer, and the film’s director reveals how that came about.
“We needed someone to do this small part of a more experimental and impromptu sequence,” Nolan said in a recent interview with The Telegraph. “So it was wonderful to just have her there.”
Flora Nolan is credited as a “Burn Victim” on IMDB for her work on “Oppenheimer.” The publication describes the unnamed character as “a young woman who appears to the title character in a hellish, conscience-shattering vision, in which a piercing white light is used to flay the flesh from her face.”
While discussing Flora’s role, Nolan noted that he “didn’t want me to sound like Michael Powell on Peeping Tom.” Nolan was referring to the 1960 film that Powell directed and in which he played his own nine-year-old son as the child version of the serial killer.
Nolan continued, “But yeah, I mean, gosh, you’re not wrong. To be honest, I try not to analyze my own intentions. But the point is that when you create ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those close and dear to you. So I suppose that was my way of expressing what I found to be the most powerful way possible.”
Flora previously starred in Nolan’s film Interstellar as Girl on Truck. She is currently a student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.