What is the name of the unnamed central character in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet?

The unnamed central character in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is called the Protagonist.

In Tenet, John David Washington’s character is credited simply as “The Protagonist.” The film deliberately withholds a conventional personal name, reinforcing the character’s role as an operative defined by actions, loyalty and mission rather than biography.

The Protagonist is recruited into a secret organisation called Tenet and investigates technology that can invert the entropy of objects and people. Inverted matter appears to move backward through time relative to the ordinary world, creating the film’s distinctive action scenes and complex chronology.

The name is sometimes confused with Tenet itself, the organisation that directs the mission. Robert Pattinson plays Neil, Elizabeth Debicki plays Kat, and Kenneth Branagh plays Andrei Sator. Unlike those characters, Washington’s role has no revealed ordinary name in the film.