Why Christopher Nolan Cast His Own Daughter as a “Burn Victim” Who Gets Blown Up in ‘Oppenheimer’

Can you still be a nepo baby if your character gets killed off? Director Christopher Nolan is featuring his own daughter in his buzzy new film Oppenheimer, but she doesn’t exactly have a plum role in the summer blockbuster.

Audiences will see Nolan’s daughter Flora — who is a student at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, according to Deadline — in a fairly catastrophic cameo in Oppenheimer. Her role is titled on IMDb as “Burn Victim,” further described as a “young woman who appears to the title character in a hellish, conscience-pricking vision, in which the flesh is flayed from her face by a piercing white light.”

Nolan spoke to The Telegraph about choosing to cast his kin in this role, which he described as a “small part of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence.”

“It was wonderful to just have her sort of roll with it,” he shared.

Flora’s IMDb credits also include “Girl on Truck” in her father’s 2014 sci-fi film Interstellar.

Nolan acknowledged that some may be baffled by his casting decision, and said he didn’t want to sound like Michael Powell in his 1960 psychological horror film Peeping Tom, in which Powell cast his 9-year-old son as the child version of a serial killer.

“Truthfully, I try not to analyze my own intentions,” Nolan began. “But the point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you. So I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.”

Flora is Nolan’s eldest daughter with his wife, British director Emma Thomas. The couple is also parents to sons Oliver and Magnus. All three children have had cameos in their father’s films; Oliver played an infant in Nolan’s 2006 sci-fi drama The Prestige, while Magnus played Leonardo DiCaprio‘s son in Inception in 2010, per IndieWire.

Nolan’s films have often paid tribute to his children, who have equally influenced his filmmaking. He told The New York Times in 2014 that “having children absolutely fine-tunes your sense of time and time passing.”

He added, “There’s a desperate desire to hang on to moments as your kids grow up.”

Oppenheimer hits theaters Friday (July 21).