New Snowden trailer sheds light on whistleblower’s private life

LOS ANGELES — Shailene Woodley gets the worst of it from Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Open Road’s new trailer for Snowden, unveiled on Thursday (July 21) at Conic-Con.

Director Oliver Stone warned during his panel for Snowden that the Pokemon Go craze represents “a new level of invasion” that could lead to totalitarianism.

Snowden stars Gordon-Levitt as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Woodley plays his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. The trailer first shows him placing his mobile phone in a microwave, warning the recipients of leaked documents that they will be targeting before meeting Woodley.

“I don’t want anyone else,” she tells him after they meet.

That’s before their apartment is bugged and Snowden faces the full wrath of the government. A saddened Woodley implores, “What is it about this job that makes it more important than your life?”

Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson and Timothy Olyphant round out the cast.

Stone directed Snowden from a script he wrote with Kieran Fitzgerald based on Luke Harding’s book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man and Time Of The Octopus, written by Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena.

Snowden was charged in 2013 by the US Department of Justice with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property, and his passport was revoked a week later by the US Department of State. He was granted temporary asylum by Russia in 2014 and received a three-year residency permit that year.

Moritz Borman is producing with Eric Kopeloff and Philip Schulz-Deyle. VARIETY.COM/REUTERS