While he’s been famous for quite a long time (he first started acting at the age of seven), and has often seemed poised to breakthrough into the big time, it’s only in the last couple of years that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has come into his own (although his indie work has often been fascinating). He was heaped with praise for last year’s (500) Days Of Summer, and while G.I. Joe may have been panned, it made a lot of cash. He’s also got a major role in this year’s Chris Nolan flick Inception, and it seems all this has given him enough cachet with the studios to move out of indie territory and into the mainstream.
Although he may not immediately come across as a man of action, he’s going to have a go, with THR reporting that he’s in final negotiations for the lead role in Columbia’s chase thriller Premium Rush, as well as the sci-fi thriller Looper. Premium Rush, written and directed by David Koepp, sees Gordon-Levitt as a New York bike messenger who picks up an envelope at Columbia University, only to be chased throughout the city by a dirty cop desperate to get his hands on it.
Looper meanwhile would seen him reteam with Brick director Rian Johnson, for a story about set during a future in which time travel has been invented, with operatives sent back to the present to assassinate criminals. Gordon-Levitt will play a man sent back to kill himself. Although I’m sure you can already see the problem with that (time travel pardoxes ahoy), hoepfully the movie has come up with an intelligent solution, or it could go down the Terminator route and completely ignore it.
It certainly seems Joseph is becoming a ‘name’ star, and he’s certainly got talent to back it up.