“Oppenheimer” is an inherently Bay Area story. When J. Robert Oppenheimer was approached about running the Manhattan Project, he was a physics professor at UC Berkeley. He recruited heavily from the school’s physics department to flesh out his team in Los Alamos, and some of the most pivotal moments of his life happened in and around the campus. 

Last year, Christopher Nolan, star Cillian Murphy and the “Oppenheimer” production team arrived on campus to shoot a few exterior scenes. Now that the movie is out, locals have a chance to see what made the final cut (minor spoilers ahead, obviously). 

When the trailer dropped for “Oppenheimer,” Berkeleyans wondered what the scene of Oppenheimer walking across Edwards field could be about. Turns out, it wasn’t supposed to be in Berkeley at all. Briefly, the Cal track and field venue stands in for Stagg Field Stadium at the University of Chicago. There, under the stands, physicist Enrico Fermi and his team were the first people to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

In the movie, Oppenheimer walks into the belly of Edwards Stadium to see Fermi’s experiment himself. 

Only locals will notice this bit of Hollywood magic. Oppenheimer and his then-fiance Jean Tatlock are walking down a street with a movie theater when someone runs by with the news that the first scientists have split the atom. 

As Murphy and Florence Pugh track the man running past them, the scene goes from a non-Berkeley street to the archway into Cal’s Faculty Glade. The edit is seamless, and you’d never know that the street doesn’t end in Faculty Glade if you didn’t know the area. 

Although Nolan shot primarily exteriors in his few days filming in Berkeley, the set decorators brought a little bit of Berkeley to the interior sets. The desks seen in the LeConte Hall classrooms are the classic old UC Berkeley desks with hard wooden backs and tiny connected writing surfaces. It’s an authentic touch that makes it feel extremely Berkeley.

As is to be expected, many scenes in “Berkeley” aren’t filmed there at all. The most noticeable are the homes lived in by Oppenheimer. He met Tatlock at a party hosted by his landlord at 2665 Shasta Road, which looks like a typical brown-shingle Berkeley home. In reality, that home is an unassuming tan building, albeit one with an incredible view out to the bay. (In an interesting bit of timing, it’s also currently for sale for $1.5 million.)

A similar Craftsman-style home stood in for 1 Eagle Hill, the residence bought by Oppenheimer after he married Kitty Harrison. The Oppenheimers would live there for 10 years.  At the time the Oppenheimers bought it — and still today — that home in Kensington has a distinctly California-Spanish style with white exteriors and a red tile roof. 

Nolan himself made a brief trip to Eagle Hill in November 2021 while scouting filming locations. Current resident Anna Myles told Berkeleyside that she got a 10-minute warning that Nolan was on his way before he arrived in a black SUV.

“He had a pretty good grounding in the historical facts and was more looking to connect some of the things that are known to have happened at the house to where they happened — to get the visual of where this was taking place, and to get the vibe of the house,” Myles recounted.

Not shown in the movie is the home on 10 Kenilworth Court where Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer spent their first year as newlyweds.