It looks like actor Nicolas Cage is breaking up with cheesy roles and will start taking more serious ones now, since he just hopped on board director Oliver Stone's new biopic Snowden, and will play the role of a former U.S. Intelligence officer.
Though no further details have been provided about Cage's role, it already sounds a lot more promising than his previous roles from films such as "The Season of the Witch" and "Outcast."
Formerly called The Snowden Files, the film will be all about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who rose to the spotlight when the documentary Citizenfour won during the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
It was made by director Laura Poitras, who even said as she received the award that "The disclosures of Edward Snowden don't only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself."
Cage will be acting alongside Joseph Gorden-Levitt (The Dark Knight Rises, 500 Days of Summer) who will play the title role.
The biopic will be written and directed by three-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone (Platoon, JFK) together with Kieran Fitzgerald, who also wrote 2014's The Homesman movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank.
Cage and Stone have previously worked before in the 2006 film World Trade Center.
The script will be based on the books "The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man" by Luke Harding and "Time of the Octopus" by Anatoly Kucherena, which has not yet been released.
Despite being based on non-fictional novels, the movie will reportedly take Snowden's story with a spy action thriller approach, chronicling his masterful escape and eventual asylum in Russia.
The movie will also tug on emotional heartstrings and deal with Snowden's personal demons: How he decided to contact the media and shared information he has obtained while working for the CIA and DIA, and how leaking intelligence information greatly affected his relationships from home and his girlfriend.
Many people have branded Snowden after that as a hero, a whistleblower, a traitor, a patriot, and even a dissident, so it's undecided how the film will portray him.
The Snowden film will also co-star Shailene Woodley, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Olyphant, Zachary Quinto, and Melissa Leo as Poitras.
It is produced by Moritz Borman, Eric Kopeloff and Philip Schulz-Deyle, while production has been scheduled already in Munich. It is set for release on December 25 this year by Open Road Films.
