If you’re making a production with J. Robert Oppenheimer in it, your casting call is likely to include Cillian Murphy.
As it turns out, Murphy — who plays the title role in Universal’s film box office hit — was also considered to play Oppenheimer in a short-lived TV series.
Manhattan, a show on WGN America nine years ago, was set in the Los Alamos, N.M. efforts to develop an atomic bomb. The series primarily centered on Frank Winter (played by John Benjamin Hickey), a physics professor leading the Manhattan Project.
J. Robert Oppenheimer appeared during the first season and in beefed up appearances in Season 2. But that was the last season for the series.
“When we were casting Oppenheimer, we went through a whole series of different ideas,” Lila Byock (The Leftovers), a writer on Manhattan and the wife of series creator Sam Shaw (Castle Rock), told Vanity Fair.
Showrunner Shaw added, “We wanted Oppenheimer to feel both like he possessed a certain undeniable charisma, a presence onstage, but also that he was playing a different instrument. He needed to feel alien, or other, in some ways.” He revealed, “Cillian Murphy was on that list.”
“It still smarts that we didn’t get to tell the story in its fullness as we had hoped,” Shaw laments.
