Shailene Woodley in talks to play Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend of Edward Snowden. Photograph: C Flanigan/FilmMagic

Shailene Woodley is in talks to play Edward Snowdens girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, in Oliver Stones upcoming film about the NSA whistleblower, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The star of blockbuster dystopian sci-fi saga Divergent and hit weepie romance The Fault in Our Stars is tipped to appear opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has already signed up to portray Snowden. Stones biopic is based on Guardian journalist Luke Hardings book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the Worlds Most Wanted Man, as well as Time of the Octopus, an upcoming novel from Snowdens lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, which is based on her experiences working with the whistleblower in Russia.

The mystery of Mills whereabouts was resolved via a documentary on Snowden, Citizenfour, that premiered in New York last month. Laura Poitrass film revealed the one-time dancer has been living with her boyfriend in Moscow since July. The revelation torpedoed the impression regularly recycled in the media of a woman abandoned in the wake of the biggest leak in US intelligence history. Reports suggested Mills had fled Hawaii, where the couple had been living prior to the NSA revelations, in a fit of pique following Snowdens departure for Hong Kong, and eventually Russia. It was thought the dancer and blogger went to stay with her parents in the US mainland.

But Snowden hinted to the Guardian that the two were not in fact estranged during an interview in July and later revealed that the pair had reconciled. Now Stones film promises to reveal what really happened in the intervening period.

She was not entirely pleased but at the same time it was an incredible reunion because she understood me. That meant a lot to me, Snowden (speaking via video link) told an audience at the New Yorker festival last month.

Snowdens revelations, first reported in the Guardian, lifted the lid on a culture of mass government surveillance and sparked a global furore. The former NSA employee has been granted temporary asylum in Russia but faces a 30-year prison sentence if he returns to the US.

Stones still-untitled film could compete with a rival project titled No Place to Hide after the book by Glenn Greenwald, the freelance journalist to whom Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents in June 2013. That film is being brought to cinemas by James Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, though the Stone version looks likely to arrive on the big screen first. It goes into production in Munich in January.

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Shailene Woodley in talks to star in Oliver Stone's Snowden film