Edward Snowden appears at secret Comic-Con screening
SAN DIEGO — From a world away, Edward Snowden critiqued the guy playing him in the upcoming Snowden as well as his own Hollywood performance.
Appearing online via a live Google Hangout, the former government contractor who leaked classified National Security Agency documents in 2013 — and is currently in exile in Moscow — joined director Oliver Stone and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley for a Q&A following Thursday's secret screening at Comic-Con.
Snowden (in theaters Sept. 16) features Gordon-Levitt as the famed whistleblower. The real Snowden praised the actor’s performance while also admitting that watching the biopic is a crazy and surreal experience.
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“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.’ For me, it sounds weird because the voice in your head is never the same thing, but if he passes the family test, he’s doing all right.”
Added Gordon-Levitt: “It means a lot to have the endorsement of Ed himself.”
The fictionalized drama is as real as it could be, says Snowden, 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 ops center he worked at in 2013, in the movie a Rubik’s Cube is used to house an SD card filled with information.
“This is one of the things that I think make it such a challenging story for Oliver to tell because there are some things that simply are not in the public record and won’t be in the near future, at least given the precarious nature of my personal situation,” explained Snowden.
But in a very realistic touch, Snowden himself appears in the movie. Stone reported that it was a gamble difficult for the rookie actor.
“We did nine takes at least from several angles, and he talks so well in interviews but it’s so hard for him to become somewhat a third person,” Stone said. “He got there eventually but it was a hard day.”
It reminded Stone of the time he directed Donald Trump in the 2010 sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps for a scene that never made it into the final cut of the film. “The difference between Donald and Ed was that, I swear to God this is true, and I love the man in a weird way, but after every take (Trump) jumped up and he said, ‘Wasn’t that great?!’ And I said, ‘Honestly, no.’ The confidence is unbelievable.”
After Snowden chuckled that “I’m not an actor.” he did call 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.
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“No one’s going to go out and read 3,000 articles that’ve been published about this,” Snowden said. “They’re not going to be able to scrutinize congressional hearings and testimony.
“But by watching the lived experiences, 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.”