Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is Edward Snowden In First Look Photo From Oliver Stone’s SNOWDEN

PHOTO CREDIT: JURGEN OLCZYK

Open Road Films has released this first photo from Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone’s international thriller, SNOWDEN.

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden, before he was a whistle-blower, Edward was an ordinary man who unquestioningly served his country.

SNOWDEN is currently shooting in Munich, before moving to locations around the world.

CITIZENFOUR, the documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras, won Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards in February. Snowden worked for the NSA for four years, from 2009 to 2013, as a private contractor, including with Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell, and as a senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency.

CITIZENFOUR is a real life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving unprecedented access to Edward Snowden as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the NSA. (Trailer)

CITIZENFOUR

On Tuesday (March 3) CNN reported Edward Snowden’s lawyer said he is ready to come home to the United States.

The former National Security Agency contractor’s Russian lawyer said he’s ready to leave the country that offered him political asylum in 2013 and return to the United States as long as he gets a fair trial.

“He is thinking about it. He has a desire to return and we are doing everything we can to make it happen,” said Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s lawyer, Agence-France Presse reported Tuesday.

Snowden has remained in Russia since he leaked thousands of classified documents to media outlets that he obtained while working for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

Kucherena said Snowden has so far received a guarantee from Attorney General Eric Holder that he will not face the death penalty — but that Snowden also wants a guarantee of a “legal and impartial trial.”

Such a trial, Snowden’s legal advisers have said, would mean he wouldn’t face charges under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that was used to charge Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Snowden’s lawyer said he’s allowed to travel outside Russia now under a three-year Russian residency permit, but that he believes Snowden would be taken immediately to a U.S. embassy as soon as he leaves the country.

SNOWDEN opens in the U.S. on December 25, 2015.