Cillian Murphy is a blue-eyed Irishman with cheekbones you could slice salt beef on but, sorry David Baddiel, as far as I’m concerned he makes a great Oppenheimer.

Baddiel has once again opened the argument over ‘Jewface’ – non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters – as Christopher Nolan’s epic takes cinemas by storm. He questions whether the film might have been more powerful had the many Jewish physicists working on the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb, including Oppenheimer himself, been played by Jewish actors.

‘Another day, another film/TV show/play in which a famous Jew is played by a non-Jew,’ Baddiel writes in the Jewish Chronicle. The suggestion is that Jewish actors would have had more empathy with antisemitism at the time, not just the Holocaust itself but their own experiences in American society. For me, though, Murphy is just right for the role for one simple reason: he looks like J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Is this casting something to get upset about?

Nolan, the film’s director, tends to use Murphy in many of his pictures anyway, so if his favourite actor is an Irish non-Jew, but just happens to resemble the Jewish-American central character in his latest blockbuster, he seems like an obvious choice. What else is Nolan going to do? Pick Jonah Hill? Seth Rogan? Woody Allen?

The truth is that Murphy looks more like Oppenheimer than pretty much any Jewish actor I can think of. Both Murphy and Oppenheimer are, or were, tall, lean with chiselled features and, most notably of all, piercing blue eyes. Oppenheimer’s eyes are described variously as ‘the brightest pale blue’, ‘the iciest pair of blue eyes’ and of ‘giving him a certain aura’ by his associates and even his opponents in the biography American Prometheus on which the film was based. Similarly, Murphy’s co-stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt admitted they were distracted by the Peaky Blinder actor’s dazzling eyes during filming.

Nolan is an English-born, English-educated son of an American mother and this British-American background (he has both US and UK citizenship apparently) is reflected in his choice of actors. In Oppenheimer, he has used a host of British actors to portray Americans in a film almost wholly about Americans. This ranges from Gary Oldman as president Truman to Emily Blunt as Mrs Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Mr O’s bit on the side, Jean Tatlock. There’s not just Jewface, then, but Yankface and a few other ‘face’ transplants.

Niels Bohr, a Norwegian whose mother was from a Jewish banking family, is played by the very British Kenneth Branagh. Albert Einstein is played by veteran Scottish-Italian Catholic-born Tom Conti. Richard Feynman, a leading theoretical physicist from a New York Jewish family, is played by Jack Quaid, who at least is American but from gentile acting stock of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. A special mention should go to Benny Safdie who is both Jewish and American and played the role of another of the Jewish boffins, Edward Teller, who was born in Hungary but raised in New York.

Is this casting something to get upset about? Hardly. There are times when I’ve seen Jewish characters on screen and felt they just didn’t look or feel right and perhaps a Jewish actor may have worked better. But then there are plenty of non-Jews who can pull if off; Eddie Marsan, for instance, on more than one occasion (he even played a character called Solly in the series Ridley Road and could have passed for one of my uncles).

Cillian Murphy now joins a ‘Jewface’ list that includes Helen Mirren as Golda Meir and pretty much the whole cast of the sitcom Friday Night Dinner and plenty of other examples, including quite a few Shylocks on stage and screen. Of course, when picking actors to play real-life people, directors will go for their favourites and argue that they are merely choosing the best person for the role. No one can claim that the actors chosen for Oppenheimer are not at the top of their game.

Nolan has made a stunning, if imperfect, film about a stunning if imperfect person. Murphy, as he always does, brings an intensity to the part and, granted, really does look like the scientist. Would anyone else – Jew or gentile – have done a better job? It seems unlikely.