Scenes in the Movie 'Oppenheimer' Shot at Cal's Edwards Stadium

Berkeley's famed track and field venue existed when Robert Oppenheimer taught at Cal, and it appears in trailers for the film, which opens Friday

If you attend the much ballyhooed movie Oppenheimer, which opens Friday, you might catch a historical Cal sports venue in one of the scenes.

Some of the movie was shot at Cal's Edwards Stadium, the site of Jim Ryun’s 1966 world-record mile run and Alex Morgan’s remarkable Cal soccer career. Well, we’re assuming Edwards Stadium is in the movie because director Christopher Nolan’s cameras were there, and Edwards Stadium appears in the official trailers for the movie.

You have to pay attention to see Edwards Stadium in the two trailers, though.

In this first trailer for Oppenheimer, Edwards Stadium appears 1:02 into the video but is gone two seconds later:

In this second trailer for Oppenheimer, the Edwards Stadium scene, with three men walking across its grass, starts 1:43 into the video and is visible for just one second:

So why is Edwards Stadium in the movie? Well, Robert Oppenheimer taught at Cal from 1929 to 1943 before moving to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to begin work on the atomic bomb. Edwards Stadium, which was opened in 1932, is one of the current Cal campus sites that existed back in Oppenheimer’s time in Berkeley, and the stadium still looks pretty much the way it did then.

There is no information suggesting Oppenheimer did anything athletic at Edwards Stadium, but he might have walked through it going to and from work, which is what the trailer suggests.

Scenes for the movie were also shot at other parts of the Cal campus, as indicated by the tweet below, but Edwards Stadium is the only athletic venue used.

Christopher Nolan filming #Oppenheimer outside my office at UC Berkeley. Or, my window is a time machine and it's showing me 1942. So, it's either physicist Robert Oppenheimer or actor #CillianMurphy who gets out of a car and walks into the physics building. pic.twitter.com/rmZq2Oqw67

— Paul G. Kalas (@Paul_G_Kalas) May 20, 2022

And Edwards Stadium has been the site of some historic track and field events, including 12 world records. Dutch Warmerdam became the first 15-foot pole vaulter there in 1940, although there is no word whether Robert Oppenheimer was on hand.  

Henry Rono broke the 5,000-meter world record at Edwards Stadium in 1978, and Ryun set the mile record with a time of 3:51.3 at Edwards Stadium in 1966 as a 19-year-old with 15,000 fans in attendance.

Here’s that race:

In 1999, Edwards Stadium also became the home of Cal soccer. Alex Morgan, who is currently participating in her fourth Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, was Cal’s star from 2007 to 2010, becoming an all-American and leading the Bears to the NCAA tournament all four seasons. Four times she scored three goals in Cal matches played at Edwards Stadium.

And now that venue can be seen in the film Oppenheimer, which stars Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr. and Rami Malek and opens on July 21.

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