Did Joseph Gordon-Levitt Meet Edward Snowden? He Can’t Say

As he tells Playboy in a long new interview, Joseph Gordon-Levitt spent eight long days with Philippe Petit, the daredevil he portrays in The Walk, working to understand how and why the Frenchman traversed a wire spanning the Twin Towers in 1974.

The Oscar-nominated actor could not be so forthcoming about whether he got to know Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who he portrays in Oliver Stone’s upcoming (though delayed) political drama Snowden.

“I can’t say. Sorry,” Gordon-Levitt said, when asked by the magazine whether he met with the former government contractor who exposed the federal government’s mass collection of American citizens’ private data. The 34-year-old actor allowed that he spent a lot of time “reading and watching” everything he could about and featuring Snowden, including last year’s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour.

The director of that film, Laura Poitras, also worked on a movie about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, another persona non-grata with the U.S. government. Perhaps as a result of that project, along with films such as her Oscar-nominated doc My Country, My Country, which was critical of the war in Iraq, she spent years on a Department of Homeland Security watch list. That led to years of harassment for the filmmaker, perhaps a fate that Gordon-Levitt wished to avoid himself.

Stone evidently had no such concerns with the potential for being tracked by the government, as he met with Snowden in Russia last year.