Apparently, Nicolas Cage is too good to be subsumed into long casting announcements and needs his own story. All right, so perhaps his deal took a little longer to nail down, but he is indeed joining the cast of Oliver Stone’s **Snowden{
Almost all the rest of the cast for Stone’s latest was revealed yesterday, with Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Rhys Ifans and Joely Richardson joining Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley and Timothy Olyphant in the based-on-truth drama about the NSA whistleblower.
Stone is making the film in Munich, having bought up two prime sources for his film: Time Of The Octopus, a novel by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, giving him access to the story of the whistleblower who reluctantly sought asylum in Russia and had to wait to see if the country would grant it. The producers also have the option on Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man.
Pitched as a thriller, Snowden will chart the experiences of Snowden (Gordon-Levitt), the whistleblowing National Security Agency contractor who began leaking classified documents to former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald in June 2013. Snowden, currently stuck in Russia after the US cancelled his passport, has become a polarising figure between those – such as the director himself – who consider him a patriotic hero, and those who feel he’s a traitor.
Cage, who previously collaborated with the director on World Trade Center,** **has more recently been splitting his time between praised work on the likes of David Gordon Green’s Joe and some odd thriller choices, is shooting crooked cop drama The Trust and is part of the cast for Pay The Ghost. He’ll also be seen in political drama The Runner.