Tom Wilkinson, Zachary Quinto to play Guardian journalists in Snowden film

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/05/tom-wilkinson-zachary-quinto-oliver-stone-guardian-journalists-edward-snowden

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Oliver Stone’s latest interrogation of American history, a drama about Edward Snowden and his leak of NSA files, has completed its latest round of casting.

Zachary Quinto, best known as Spock in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, is to play Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with Snowden to report on his revelations for the Guardian. Tom Wilkinson will play Ewan MacAskill, another Guardian journalist who headed up the story.

They’re joined by Melissa Leo, an Oscar-winner in 2010 for The Fighter, who will play film-maker Laura Poitras. Her documentary Citizenfour was filmed as Snowden went public with his findings, and has subsequently been nominated for an Oscar this year.

It’s a return to familiar ground for Stone whose previous film, the bug-eyed drama Savages, wasn’t particularly well-received. He’s known for swaggering takes on key moments in US history, from the 9/11 attacks to the Vietnam war and the 2008 financial crisis; he’s also made a trio of studies of American presidents, with a near-psychedelic vision of Nixon, a paranoid report on JFK, and a scathing George W. Bush film.

Related: Citizenfour leads pack in Oscar documentary category

He has already cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his lead in the as-yet untitled Snowden film, with Shailene Woodley playing his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. For his source material, he’s drawing on The Snowden Files by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, and Time of the Octopus, by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena.

Snowden and Greenwald continue to campaign against government surveillance – they appeared via video link at a Canadian private school earlier this week, discussing the country’s proposed new terrorism legislation. “Your government continuously hypes the threat and tells you that unless you give it more and more power it will be incapable of saving you from this threat,” Greenwald said. “And this fearmongering is a very dangerous, yet very effective form of persuading people to submit to things you otherwise wouldn’t submit to.”