Christopher Nolan's daughter gets the 'flesh' on her face 'flayed' off in her brief, yet memorable, 'Oppenheimer' cameo

• Christopher Nolan said he cast his daughter last minute in a role in his new film "Oppenheimer."
• According to The Telegraph, 22-year-old Flora Nolan plays a character who gets her face melted off.

"Oppenheimer" may not be widely considered a family film, but it is to Christopher Nolan.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, the 52-year-old director confirmed that his eldest daughter makes a brief yet explosive cameo in the film opposite its lead, Cillian Murphy.

According to Nolan, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to cast Flora Nolan, 22, in "Oppenheimer" while she was visiting him on set during filming. Flora, a member of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts class of 2024, previously played an extra in his 2014 film "Interstellar."

"We needed someone to do that small part of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence," he said. But this was no run-off-the-mill extra work.

As The Telegraph's Robbie Collin noted, Flora plays a nameless woman who gets the "flesh" on her face "flayed" off in a dream that Murphy's titular character has.

Despite the gruesome visuals, Nolan had nothing but praise for his daughter. "It was wonderful to just have her sort of roll with it," he added.

Pressed by Collin to elaborate on what it was like to stage her death, the director said he hoped he wasn't being made to sound like filmmaker Michael Powell, who controversially cast his 9-year-old son as a child-version of a serial killer and himself as the boy's dictatorial father in the 1960 film, "Peeping Tom."

"But yes, I mean, gosh, you're not wrong. Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions. But the point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you," Nolan said. "So I suppose this was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms."

As spine-chilling as the scene may be, audiences can rest assured knowing the explosive imagery in "Oppenheimer" was created using practical effects and analog methods.

As Insider's Olivia Singh previously reported, Nolan said he prefers using those methods over CGI. While discussing the film in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan said he took it as a compliment that some people mistakenly believed he detonated an actual atomic bomb on the set of "Oppenheimer."

"It's flattering that people would think I would be capable of something as extreme as that on the one hand, but it's also a little bit scary," he said.

"Oppenheimer,s also written by Nolan, is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer."

The star-studded movie centers on American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), who oversaw the invention of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. It hits theatres on Friday, July 21.