“Divergent” star Shailene Woodley is in negotiations to join Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Oliver Stone‘s untitled Edward Snowden movie, an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap.
Gordon-Levitt will play the NSA contractor who leaked classified documents, prompting the media to both champion him as a whistleblower and call him a traitor.
Woodley is nearing a deal to play Snowden’s longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills, a dancer who recently moved to Moscow to live with him.
Woodley has been hard at work on her successful “Divergent” franchise, having recently wrapped sequel “Insurgent,” and she recently starred in the blockbuster YA adaptation “The Fault In Our Stars,” which has landed her in the thick of the awards race this season.
She has balanced those commercial hits with challenging indie fare such as Gregg Araki’s “White Bird in a Blizzard,” and it appears that the Edward Snowden movie offers the kind of complex lead role that a young actress would welcome.
Tom Ortenberg‘s Open Road Films and James D. Stern’s Endgame Entertainment recently partnered on the U.S. release of the Edward Snowden film, which writer-director Stone based on the books “Time of the Octopus” by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, and “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man” by journalist Luke Harding.
Moritz Borman and Eric Kopeloff to produce the film, which is slated to start production in January in Munich.
Woodley, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for “The Descendants,” is represented by Paradigm, Principato-Young Entertainment and Felker Toczek.
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news.