Edward Snowden in popular culture is part of the reactions to global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. His impact as a public figure has been felt in cinema, advertising, video games, literature, music, statuary, and social media.
Cinema
Shorts
Snowden's passage through Hong Kong inspired a local production team to produce a low-budget five-minute film titled Verax. The film, depicting the time Snowden spent hiding in the Mira Hotel while being unsuccessfully tracked by the CIA and China's Ministry of State Security, was uploaded to YouTube in June 2013.
Feature films
A dramatic thriller, Classified: The Edward Snowden Story, was released on September 19, 2014. This feature-length film, which was crowdfunded and offered as a free download, was directed by Jason Bourque and produced by Travis Doering. Actor Kevin Zegers played Edward Snowden, Michael Shanks played Glenn Greenwald and Carmen Aguirre played Laura Poitras.
In 2014, film director Oliver Stone bought the rights to Time of the Octopus, a forthcoming novel based on Snowden's life and written by his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena. Stone said he would use both Kucherena's book and Luke Harding's nonfiction The Snowden Files for the screenplay of his movie, which began production later in 2014. Stone's biopic Snowden, which was released in September 2016, had Snowden portrayed by American actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with a short appearance by Snowden himself in the last few minutes of the film. Shortly before release, Stone said that Snowden should be pardoned, calling him a "patriot above all" and suggesting that he should run the NSA himself.
Snowden appears briefly as a character in the 2018 comedy-thriller The Spy Who Dumped Me, in which he is played by British actor Tom Stourton.
Documentaries
On October 10, 2014, Citizenfour, a documentary about Snowden, received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Earlier that year, director Laura Poitras told Associated Press she was editing the film in Berlin because she feared her source material would be seized by the government inside the U.S. The two-hour film was shot in various countries, tracing Snowden's time in Hong Kong and Moscow. The film was released in the U.S. and Europe to wide acclaim from critics, and won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Snowden declared in a February 2015 Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") that he had no commercial interest in the film.
In October 2014, Killswitch, a film that features Snowden as well as Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu, received its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Editing. It has since played alongside Citizenfour at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and has continued an international film festival run. The film probes the efforts of big business to control the Internet, the efforts of government to regulate it, the efforts of hacktivists to free up information worldwide and the consequences.
A second Snowden documentary, titled Snowden's Great Escape, coproduced by Germany's Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Denmark's DR TV, was released in 2015. Filmed in Moscow, it incorporated two new interviews with Snowden and was awarded first prize in the documentaries category by Deutsche Fernsehakademie.
In June 2018 as part of the anniversary of the revelations from Snowden, the documentary "Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or Spy", produced by Signpost Film Productions and GTV, was released on Norwegian, Danish and Dutch Television and is continuing its further international release. The documentary presents interviews with participants and witnesses, some of whom have never before spoken on camera, and aims to incorporate the wide variety of views on the revelations. The documentary was released October 4, 2018, at the Fraud Film Festival and was shown at the Cyber Security week also on October 4, 2018, both in the Netherlands.
Television
Homeland, an American television series on Showtime, had an hours-long video call with Snowden to inform the writers and actors on storylines for the show. This was prior to him doing interviews or documentaries.
A parody of Snowden, named "Znowden", appears in the 2019 Lupin III anime TV special, Goodbye Partner. As a fan of the series, Snowden compared it to a lifetime achievement award.
Animaniacs featured a parody of Snowden on Pinky and the Brain, where he is depicted as having an unhealthy fixation on his vast houseplant collection. He helps the duo break into the NSA as part of their plan to take over the world, but only in exchange for "rescuing" a beloved rare fern from his old office.