Trivia / Sneakers

• All-Star Cast: To an almost ridiculous extent. Robert Redford is the lead, his team is Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, and (the now sadly deceased) River Phoenix, and Ben Kingsley played Cosmo — plus a One-Scene Wonder appearance by James Earl Jones. Of the principal cast, only David Straithairn had not been at least nominated for an Academy Award by the time of Sneakers' production. Straithairn would later get a nomination for Good Night, and Good Luck..
• Cast the Runner-Up: After he was sent a script and offered the role of Mother, Dan Aykroyd made a pitch to be cast as Cosmo instead. He ceded after learning that Ben Kingsley was in line for the role.
• Corpsing: The male NSA agents accompanying Abbot do this when Carl is asking for the female NSA agent's number during what was supposed to be a serious negotiation for the box.
• Hey, It's That Place!: The building where Cosmo gets arrested in the prologue has a long history in cinema, stretching back to its debut as a courthouse in the 1948 film An Act Of Murder. To modern audiences, it's probably most recognizable as the Hill Valley clock tower in Back to the Future.
• Technical Advisor: The script and slides for Janek's lecture on the mathematical underpinnings of the codebreaking MacGuffin were created by Len Adleman, one of the mathematicians behind the real-life RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) public-key encryption system. Since the whole point is that it's an entirely new technique previously unknown to science, his brief was not to ensure accuracy but rather to produce some impressive technobabble with just enough relation to reality to sound plausible.
• Throw It In!: Stephen Tobolowsky said in an interview the director told him to do anything to get Mary McDonnell to laugh in their scenes together, so he did things like say his name while his mouth was stuffed with food.

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