“Oppenheimer” star Matt Damon recently revealed his promise to his wife, Luciana, that he would take a break from Hollywood with only one stipulation: if he got offered the role in “Oppenheimer” by Christopher Nolan, he would take it. The actor shared that he had made the promise to his wife, and soon after he received a call from Christopher Nolan offering him a role in the highly anticipated film. “This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” began Damon while attending a panel for Entertainment Weekly with costars Robert Downey Jr., Cillian Murphy, and Emily Blunt.  “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I actually negotiated in couples therapy — this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.” Damon previously appeared in Nolan’s film “Interstellar” and revealed that the director “put me on ice for a couple movies,” saying that he wasn’t “in rotation” for Nolan’s newer projects. However, Damon and his wife agreed that if he got the call from Nolan, he would take it.

Damon played Gen. Leslie Groves Jr., who was the director of the Manhattan project. It was a top-secret program led by Murphy’s character as Oppenheimer where he designed and developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. “I started researching and thinking about playing this character,” said Damon. “It was really amazing learning about what they did and how they did it… Gen. Groves was a brilliant guy and not well-liked at all by the scientists because there was this constant tension between the military and the scientists… There was this real tension that I think the script… covered really very, very well.”