Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was that rare movie that was both a box office hit and a serious award winner. It also had one of the most incredibly stacked casts in recent memory. Jack Quaid was but one member of the Oppenheimer cast, and even he was stunned by the actors involved as well as his accomplished director.
Quaid has a relatively small role in Oppenheimer as physicist Richard Feynman. His most notable scene in the film may be his character playing the bongos (something Feynman actually did) at a Los Alamos Christmas party. Quaid told Men’s Health that while he’s a “glorified extra” in the scene, it was still one of his favorite moments because of everything he got to witness. Quaid said…
One of my favorite moments from shooting was, obviously, I’m playing the bongos a lot. But I remember shooting the Christmas party scene, and it was incredible. I’m playing the bongos, and more of a glorified extra in that, but looking around the room, not caring about the size of my role at all, just looking around and getting to see, like, OK, there’s Kenneth Branagh, there’s Emily Blunt, there’s Cillian Murphy, there’s Matt Damon—and they’re all doing, like, the best work of their career, and I just get to watch it. It was unbelievable.
Christopher Nolan movies are almost always stacked with amazing actors because they all want to work with the accomplished director. The Odyssey cast is already looking incredible. Having said that, the Oppenheimer cast was even more incredible than most considering the quite massive number of actors that were needed to play all the key roles. In this one scene, as Quaid notes, the number of amazing actors is just nuts.
It’s no surprise that Jack Quaid was a bit in awe of the cast that he was part of. Still, even in this simple scene, Jack Quaid still did enough to catch the eye of Christopher Nolan. Quaid said that the director specifically complimented him on his performance in the scene. Quaid continued…
But then the next day, we were shooting something else, and Chris stops everything, and just looks at me, and goes [Nolan impersonation] ‘I saw the dailies for the bongos—you really impressed me.’ And I just never in a million years thought I would get a bongo compliment from Christopher Nolan, but there we were. Really surreal, really weird, but so great.
Quaid may have felt like he was somebody on the outside looking in at all the other stars, but he has since become friends with some of them. Much of the Oppenheimer cast still talk via text in a group chat that’s being called the Oppenhomies.
Quaid's career has been going quite well since Oppenheimer. At this rate, it won't be long before somebody else is really happy to have shared a scene with him.
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