There’s a real-life Barbenheimer — and she’s been having a wild few months.
Barbara “Barbie” Oppenheimer has experienced an exciting summer amid the double-feature of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” that sparked a mashup obsession on the internet.
The 68-year-old grandmother of five is owning her name, which has taken the world by storm.
“The Barbenheimer craze has added some more fun to my already good life. It’s been great fun,” Oppenheimer told The Post. “I’m having a lot of fun with the craze. It’s always important to embrace the serendipity in life, isn’t it?”
While her friends think the double feature is a “wonderful coincidence,” Oppenheimer said that many strangers are taken aback when she introduces herself.
“Most people don’t believe me when I say my name. They think I’m joking,” she told The Post.
Oppenheimer, from Newton, Mass., said that her two sons like to get in on the joke as well.
“We were all just together to celebrate my husband’s 70th birthday when the Slate interview broke, and of course, they were critiquing my responses,” she said, referencing a recent interview on the site.
“My older son bought me a Barbenheimer T-shirt for my October birthday but was disappointed that I already had one,” she shared.
“Most of my grandchildren are too young to understand the craze, but my oldest granddaughter, who is only 7 and a past big Barbie fan, was intrigued.”
In that interview, Oppenheimer said she was sure her “summer of fame” would go by fast, but she finds the whole thing “pretty funny.”
“I had college friends around the world texting me that weekend when they came out, with the whole schmear, you know … ‘the bomb and the bombshell,’” Oppenheimer told Slate. “It was a brilliant thing that they launched them together. It really brought people back into movie theaters.”
She might go by Barbara now, but there was a time when she was a true Barbie girl and went by the memorable moniker.
“You know, I started as a Barbie, spelled just like Barbie. Because in those days, everyone wanted to be like Barbie. Then when I got to be 12, I changed it to Barby, with a Y, and then I became Barb,” she told the outlet. “I grew up in Milwaukee, it was the Midwest—of course, I was Barb. But then when I graduated and got my fellowship at Mass General, I went by Barbara. I was so professional and serious.”
While many moviegoers couldn’t decide which movie to see first, Oppenheimer went to the opening weekend of “Oppenheimer” since, in a possibly not-so-surprising twist, her husband is related to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man dubbed “the father of the atomic bomb” who is at the center of the film.
“My husband’s father is third cousins to J. Robert, so we really wanted to see how they treated his story,” she shared.
While the famed physicist is a “distant relation,” she still found that he was portrayed well in the film.
“Well, the first thing I heard before I even saw it was that it’s three hours long, and you’re like, ‘Oh, boy.’ But I didn’t find that a barrier at all,” Oppenheimer said. “I thought they did a good job. It really gets into the moral dilemmas that Oppenheimer faced. Did he face them head-on at the time? That’s a good question.”
She continued, “I come out of the science fields. I was a professor in the health sciences. And so watching him deal with these questions, and the politicization of it … I thought some of the most interesting scenes were about the patriotism at Los Alamos, as the staff felt at the time.”
Oppenheimer is now retired, but she was a speech and language pathology professor at Boston University — a job she said she took “a little more seriously than Ken took beach.”
She added, “But I was pleased with the movie because it gets people thinking about these questions, and what role he played in history. He was a hero to many, but he was also the subject of a lot of anger. I mean, I’ve always heard in my husband’s family, whether you claimed him as a relative or didn’t really depended on how you felt about things.”
About two weeks after seeing the Christopher Nolan movie, Oppenheimer and her husband went to see “Barbie” — and neither film disappointed the couple.
“We loved both of them in different ways. I wasn’t sure my husband would like ‘Barbie,’ but he laughed out loud through the whole thing,” Oppenheimer said.
The couple didn’t wear pink to “Barbie,” but Oppenheimer is seeing it again with a group of friends who all plan to dress in the trendy color — and she’s going to pull out her Barbenheimer shirt for the occasion.
And while she loved both movies, she said she couldn’t decide which one she liked better.
“They’re so different. I think of myself — though I’m sure I’ve fallen behind the times — as a feminist, because of the generation I came out of. So I was tickled pink, I might say, that they put Barbie in the Barbie world and then Barbie in the real world. I laughed out loud practically through the whole thing,” she shared.
“‘Oppenheimer’ is more serious — not that feminism isn’t. I do think there were some serious notes … women today stand on the shoulders of their mothers, who lived the Barbie life.
“I can’t choose. I’m glad I saw both.”
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