Bronzenheimer Breaks His Silence

A Q&A with Oppenheimer’s Tom Ford Bronzer.

Cillian Murphy at the Oppenheimer UK Premiere at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on July 13, 2023 in London. (Photo: Samir Hussein/WireImage)

Nearly a month after its release, I sought refuge from the Brooklyn humidity and finally saw Oppenheimer. (I’m on God’s timing, not my own.) Nothing could’ve prepared me for it, although three friends did try to prepare me for it: “Oppenheimer is a CLOWN CAR of whos.” “There is a line in Oppenheimer that is begging for a Hung Up post.” “You will get a lot of material, I will say that.” 

Oppenheimer has such delirious, falsely-confusing sprawl: In one timeline J. Robert Oppenheimer is strutting around Los Alamos, New Mexico managing the Manhattan Project. In another timeline, Robert Downey Jr. is doing a kind of extended Alan Alda impression. In the third timeline, Oppenheimer is locked in an office closet, sitting through an Aaron Sorkin-y kangaroo court convened to embarrass him. And in the fourth timeline, the one we’re actually living in, Tracy Letts, Paul Sparks, Eric Bogosian, and Danny Huston are trying to figure out why they didn’t get a call-enheimer from Christopher Nolan’s casting director.

Ultimately, Oppenheimer is like 20th Century Women, if that movie wasn’t about raising a good man, but men being men, and one person (Annette Bening/Cillian Murphy) staring absently into the distance, giving a very controlled performance where they fret about their creation (motherhood/fatherhood). And, at random times, out pops Einstein.

But there is one contribution to Oppenheimer that cannot go unnoticed, whose talents are of particular interest to Hung Up’s devoted readership: that of the Tom Ford bronzer, made famous by Bradley Cooper-as-Jackson Maine in A Star is Born. The bronzer — or Bronzenheimer, if you will — agreed to answer a few questions via phone, and I love interviewing inanimate objects. (The dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes have barred most press opportunities, but Bronzenheimer is not a member of either union. I checked!)

What drew you to Oppenheimer? How did it come together?
I got divorced and I have two kids in private school. I mean, why lie? It’s been a lean few years and I needed the work. They needed someone, and ever since the Chanel bronzer got on the Allure list, she’s impossible to get on the phone with.

I would’ve thought that after A Star Is Born you would’ve been very in demand.
After A Star Is Born, I got maybe two calls. I worked with Dakota Johnson on The Lost Daughter, and Jake Gyllenhaal said he might have something for me for his Leonard Bernstein biopic, but we know how that turned out. I went in for The White Lotus’s second season, but I got let go pretty quickly — why does Theo James need me when he’s actually in Sicily!

I’m sorry to hear that.
Oh, and Stillwater — you remember that Matt Damon movie? I went in for that one, but it didn’t really work out.

Ah, well —
I left, if you must know. There were some creative differences.