Christopher Nolan has revealed why he cast his daughter Flora as a girl who gets blown up in a nuclear explosion in his movie Oppenheimer.

In the upcoming movie, the university student has a cameo appearance as a nameless woman whose face gets melted off as a result of the atomic bomb. She appears in a vision in the mind of Cillian Murphy’s scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who developed the nuclear weapon.

During an interview with The Telegraph, the Inception filmmaker explained that he cast Flora simply because she was on set at the time.

“We needed someone to do that small part of a somewhat experimental and spontaneous sequence,” Nolan stated. “So it was wonderful to just have her sort of roll with it.”

Nolan told the interviewer that he hoped he wasn’t going to make him sound like “Michael Powell on Peeping Tom”, referring to director Powell casting his own nine-year-old son as the childhood version of a serial killer in the 1960 horror movie.

“But yes, I mean, gosh, you’re not wrong. Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions,” he continued. “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, one of Nolan and Emma Thomas’ four children, is credited on IMDb as “Burn Victim”. She previously played “Girl on Truck” in her father’s 2014 movie Interstellar.

Oppenheimer will be released in cinemas on Friday.

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