Playing Edward Snowden, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is paranoid. And with good reason.
“They’re going to come for me,” he said in the second trailer for “Snowden,” which offers a much closer look at what happened to the whistleblower as he attempted to share government secrets.
“And now that we’ve made contact they’re going to come for all of you, too.”
The new teaser shows Snowden as he first acquaints himself with journalists on whom he called upon to share mounds of data obtained through his job at the National Security Agency (NSA).
The latest clip for the Oliver Stone film also offers a first look at the romance between Snowden and his girlfriend, played by Shailene Woodley, and depicts the moment when he realizes his house is being bugged.
Also starring Tom Wilkinson, Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Scott Eastwood, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant and Ben Schnetzer, the film opens Sept. 16.
Stone made his first-ever appearance at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday to discuss the biopic just hours before the trailer posted.
He indicated that the real-life Snowden remains something of an enigma — in spite of his many hours of research and meetings with the man.
“Right now, ‘Snowden’ is a larger than life story of what’s happening right now under our noses and it affects the majority of you, in our audience,” Stone said as he opened his first appearance on stage at Hall H at San Diego’s convention center, at a panel that also included Levitt, Quinto and Woodley.
Stone described at length the effort he and his team spent trying to really get to know Edward — from visiting him in person in Moscow to discussing the Snowden case with The Guardian journalists who covered the resulting scandal when the NSA analyst became a whistleblower against the U.S. government’s secret surveillance programs.
But despite all their efforts to see the big picture, Stone said, they never quite got there.
“We went as far as we could,” Stone said. “There are things that we [still] don’t know.”