This puzzle ties in to a very noticeable nuclear-physics-and-fruit-themed Week 5 class proposal:
🍒 Nuclear 🍒 physics 🍒 via 🍒 fruit 🍒 puzzles 🍒 (Team KEN (Kevin 🍈 Eric 🍈 Narmada), 1-4 days)
Math is hard, let's go shopping! Shopping for 🍉 fruit 🍉, that is. You may have seen 🍉 fruit 🍉 puzzles online that look deceptively simple, but turn out to be related to algebraic geometry. Did you know that many other advanced topics can be formulated in terms of 🍉 fruit 🍉? 🍉 Fruit 🍉 is everything. Physics is just 🍉 fruit 🍉.
In this class, we'll cover several different applications of fruit to nuclear physics:
The blurb itself also has a few references to Barbie ("Math is hard, let's go shopping", and a play on the movie's tagline "She's everything. He's just Ken."), so this is the great Barbenheimer-Week-5-Puzzlehunt crossover.
Every actor listed in the puzzle itself plays a role in the Oppenheimer movie whose profession matches one of the Barbie variants in the Barbie movie, with three exceptions specified by Barbie herself. (It would be too much to hope that there were a canonically Weird or Mermaid role in the Oppenheimer movie, sadly.) Take the actresses for the corresponding Barbie variants in the order the fruit emoji appear in the Week 5 class blurb, and index into the actress names by that emoji's count:
| Actor | Role | Occupation | Corresponding Barbie actress | Fruit | Count | Letter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| John Cena | Kenmaid | a MERMAID version of Ken in the Barbie movie rather than Oppenheimer (as noted by Barbie) | DUALIPA | 🍒 | 6 | P |
| Tony Goldwyn | Gordon Gray | an official who once owned newspapers (as noted by Barbie), making him somewhat of a JOURNALIST | RITUARYA | 🍈 | 2 | I |
| Harry Groener | Gale W. McGee | a senator and ambassador, making him a DIPLOMAT | NICOLACOUGHLAN | 🍉 | 10 | G |
| Gary Oldman | Harry S. Truman | the 33rd PRESIDENT of the United States | ISSARAE | 🍇 | 7 | E |
| Jack Quaid | Richard Feynman | a WEIRD guy (as noted by Barbie, who doesn't care he's a physicist) | KATEMCKINNON | 🍊 | 11 | O |
| Jason Clarke | Roger Robb | a circuit JUDGE | ANACRUZKAYNE | 🍏 | 2 | N |
| Florence Pugh | Jean Tatlock | a psychiatrist and physician, making her more of a standard DOCTOR than just having a doctorate (like most of the characters in Oppenheimer) | HARINEF | 🍎 | 1 | H |
| David Dastmalchian | William L. Borden | a LAWYER | SHARONROONEY | 🍋 | 5 | O |
| Jefferson Hall | Haakon Chevalier | a WRITER and professor of French literature | ALEXANDRASHIPP | 🍌 | 2 | L |
| Cillian Murphy | J. Robert Oppenheimer | a PHYSICIST (duh) | EMMAMACKEY | 🥝 | 1 | E |
The answer is therefore PIGEONHOLE.