You know what positively thrills me? All over the country, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people watching Oppenheimer at this very moment. And this means that all over the country, dozens of people, maybe more, are having the following thought dawn on them: David Krumholtz kind of rules.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Oppenheimer yet, I can’t emphasize enough the degree to which every white man you’ve ever heard of is in this movie. It’s not just that Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. are deigning to play supporting roles—literal Oscar winners like Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, and Kenneth Branagh show up and have, like, six lines each. More fairly prominent people like Tony Goldwyn, Jack Quaid, and Dane DeHaan are there too, in totally unimportant roles. The sheer number of guys we’re dealing with here is such that an actor I love named Michael Angarano is in the movie and I literally didn’t notice him. I haven’t even mentioned Josh Hartnett yet! It’s unreal, the density of guys you will recognize. So when I say that David Krumholtz was my favorite member of the ensemble, know that he faced some stiff competition.
In the movie, Krumholtz plays Isidor Isaac Rabi, a colleague and friend of Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer. They first meet as young physicists in Europe, two Jewish kids from New York, but as Rabi’s ribbing of Oppenheimer for not speaking Yiddish underscores, they come from different backgrounds: Rabi is an Eastern European immigrant from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, but Oppenheimer had a comparatively fancier path, emigrating from what is now Germany and living on Riverside Drive. Where Oppenheimer can be aloof, Rabi is warm and friendly, handing him orange slices and commanding him, “Eat!,” bubbe-style. Compared with characters like Benny Safdie’s Edward Teller who clash with Oppenheimer, it’s hard not to be partial to loyal, circumspect Rabi, who is, as one Twitter user put it, the “conscience of the film.” He’s a likable character as written, but Krumholtz was the perfect choice to play him—there are not very many actors whose geniality can withstand audiences watching them build a bomb that has the power to destroy humanity, but such is the magic of Krumholtz.
I’ve been pleased to see that I’m not the only person who walked out of Oppie high on Krumholtz’s portrayal of Rabi. As another Twitter user put it, “I’m watching ‘Oppenheimer’ and looking for something good, something pure in the darkness and who do I see? David Krumholtz. MVP of the film.” Yet another wrote, “We are on the precipice of David Krumholtz having a mid to late career resurgence as a kind and wise Jewish man in every period drama set in New York for the next 15–20 years.” We should be so lucky!
On Reddit a couple of weeks ago, fans of the movie podcast Blank Check started a thread devoted to Krumholtz worship. The original post reads, “Look obviously Oppenheimer is full of likeable middle-aged men being compelling, but my god has David Krumholtz hit his stride. Like he was decent as a young guy, but I am LOVING this avuncular chap with that distinct New York Jewish charm and a wistful smile who exudes intelligence and integrity. I loved that upsetting, harrowing, depressing movie, but it absolutely could have done with more Krumholtz.” Other users chimed in to agree: “I want more than a krum, I want the whole loaf,” one said, a catchphrase I would love to start seeing on T-shirts and bumper stickers. Another wrote, “He gave so much Alfred Molina in this movie that for a second I thought he WAS him. Which is a big compliment.”
As the Reddit thread alludes to, Krumholtz has been knocking around Hollywood for a while now. He is one of several former child stars in Oppenheimer, itself a strong argument for Christopher Nolan as visionary. Krumholtz is particularly remembered for playing Bernard the Elf in 1994’s The Santa Clause, a role he was actually still playing as of last year’s Disney+ revival series. You’ve got to respect someone appearing simultaneously in two properties as different as The Santa Clause and Oppenheimer. Many of Krumholtz’s roles, Oppenheimer and the CBS procedural Numb3rs among them, have had a distinctly Jewish flavor, so it’s hilarious to think that one of his earliest and still most famous roles was as one of Santa’s elves. Perhaps it was a joke that went over my head as a child that Santa would have such a Jewish-coded elf? In any case, some of Krumholtz’s best roles over the years have been in this tradition, from Goldstein in the Harold & Kumar movies to his lone-episode appearance on Freaks and Geeks as an older brother of one of the geeks, which is impossible to watch without developing a crush on him. Krumholtz more recently showed up in The Plot Against America and Leopoldstadt on Broadway, and it’s pleasing to see that the entertainment industry now accepts that when making something very Jewish, Krumholtz better be in the mix. He also seems to have menschy values in real life: Did you catch him on the Screen Actors Guild picket line with his castmates this week?
Many of us have been proudly Krumholtz-pilled for years now, and I suspect that many more have unconsciously loved him but didn’t realize it until Oppenheimer. Whatever the case, it’s been wonderful to witness this collective awakening. Barbenheimer has gotten a lot of credit for bringing people together and making them feel like they’re part of something again, but maybe David Krumholtz has been doing more of the heavy lifting than anyone’s acknowledged. He’s the heart of the movie, people! Is there a Barbenheimer without him? I’m glad we’ll never have to find out.
