Should Oppenheimer have been played by a Jewish actor?

Cillian Murphy is a blue-eyed Irishman with cheekbones you could slice salt beef on but, sorry David Baddiel, as far as I’m concerned he makes a great Oppenheimer.

Baddiel has once again opened the argument over ‘Jewface’ – non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters – as Christopher Nolan’s epic takes cinemas by storm. He questions whether the film might have been more powerful had the many Jewish physicists working on the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb, including Oppenheimer himself, been played by Jewish actors.

‘Another day, another film/TV show/play in which a famous Jew is played by a non-Jew,’ Baddiel writes in the Jewish Chronicle. The suggestion is that Jewish actors would have had more empathy with antisemitism at the time, not just the Holocaust itself but their own experiences in American society. For me, though, Murphy is just right for the role for one simple reason: he looks like J.