Whistleblower plays critic at secret screening of biopic
From a world away, Edward Snowden critiqued the guy playing him in the upcoming film Snowden, as well as his own Hollywood performance.
The former United States government contractor who leaked classified National Security Agency documents in 2013, and is currently in exile in Moscow, joined director Oliver Stone and actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley via video link for a question-and-answer session following a secret screening of the film at Comic-Con in San Diego on Friday.
Snowden stars Gordon-Levitt as the famed whistleblower. The real Snowden praised the actor’s performance while also admitting that watching the biopic was a crazy and surreal experience.
‘‘I don’t think anybody looks forward to having a movie made about themselves, particularly somebody who’s a privacy advocate,’’ Snowden said.
‘‘Some of my family members have said, ‘He sounds just likes you’. If he passes the family test, he’s doing all right.’’
The fictionalised drama was as real as it could be, Snowden said, but some things had to be plotted for the Hollywood story. For example, while it’s never been disclosed how Snowden sneaked the classified documents out of the Hawaiian operations centre he worked at, in the movie a Rubik’s Cube is used to house an SD card filled with information.
But in a very realistic touch, Snowden himself appears in the movie. Stone said it was a difficult gamble. ‘‘He talks so well in interviews but it’s so hard for him to become somewhat a third person.’’
After Snowden chuckled that ‘‘I’m not an actor’’, he called Gordon-Levitt and Woodley (who plays Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills) ‘‘champions for the public good’’ in reaching a new audience and getting people to talk about important political issues.
‘‘No-one’s going to go out and read 3000 articles that’ve been published about this,’’ he said. ‘‘But by watching . . . the performances of these actors, and then tying it back in that magic Oliver Stone moment, it was something that made me really nervous, but I think he made it work.’’