Joseph Gordon-Levitt thinks you should be macho to be a whistleblower

Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be starring as Edward Snowden — former CIA employee turned whistleblower — in an upcoming biopic. Hopefully Gordon-Levitt brushed up on his hacking skills and beasted it up at the gym ahead of filming. You know, because leaking classified NSA documents is a job for a swole-ass motherfucker. Well, at least according to a statement from Gordon-Levitt in a recent Cnet story. 

"Think about what he did and the dangers he put himself in," Gordon-Levitt told Cnet. "It's a little shocking because he seems like just this really nice, sweet guy. [Laughs] He doesn't seem like the kind of guy that risked his life for what he believed in because when you think of a guy [like that], you tend to think of a big, macho, physical fighter." 

Snowden did put himself in danger — he is now exiled in Russia. And while one could argue that what Snowden did requires intelligence and courage, it doesn't require masculine pride or powerful biceps.

He also fed into another damaging stereotype of people involved in tech when he said he expected Snowden to be socially inept. Cnet asked Gordon-Levitt if Snowden was what he expected when he met Snowden in Moscow before filming, he first said that, because he knows "a fair amount of really techie people," he knows "they're not always the easiest to connect to on a personal level," but that Snowden was in fact "really easy to talk to, really warm and very thoughtful."