Joseph Gordon-Levitt “So Happy” Shailene Woodley Is In “Killer Heat” (Exclusive)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was thrilled to work with Shailene Woodley again on her new crime thriller.

When I recently spoke to PEOPLE about his new Prime Video film Killer heatGordon-Levitt, 43, says it was “a great pleasure” to work with Woodley, 32, again in the new film, which comes eight years after the pair starred together in the 2016 thriller biopic. Snowden.

“When I called Shae, several years had passed since we had spoken,” Gordon-Levitt tells PEOPLE about recruiting Woodley for Killer heat. In SnowdenGordon-Levitt played the title character Edward Snowden, while Woodley played whistleblower and wife of a former CIA employee Lindsay Mills.

“You know when you have a really good friend and it's been a while, you just get caught up in all the comfort and friendship that you had in the past. That's how you know it's a really good friend? It's just like with Shae,” Gordon-Levitt says of reconnecting with Woodley for Killer heat.

“I thought, 'Hey, do you want to go to Greece?'” he added. “And I'm so glad it worked out.”

In Killer heatGordon-Levitt plays a private investigator named Nick Bali who travels to the Greek island of Crete to investigate the accidental death of a young man from a wealthy family on the island. Richard Madden plays both the victim, Leo Vardakis, and his identical twin Elias, while Woodley plays Elias' wife Penelope, who hires Nick because she suspects something suspicious has happened to her brother-in-law.

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“It's funny because he's just such a sweetheart,” adds Gordon-Levitt of his other Madden co-star, whose dual role provides much of the tension at the core of the film. “And he plays these two really evil guys, and they're both pretty messed up, nasty characters in different ways. And Richard himself is kind of like a teddy bear, a real sweetheart.”

Gordon-Levitt, Woodley and Madden directed the film, which is based on the novel by Jo Nesbø. The jealous man – on location in Greece, and Gordon-Levitt says he felt “so lucky” to be able to work in such a beautiful setting on the island.

“I just consider it such a privilege. I feel so lucky,” he says. “I got to visit a lot of different places and there are very, very few places more beautiful than the island of Crete. I had never been to Greece before I got to make this film and it's a cliche – the beauty of Greece – but it's a cliche for a reason. It's damn beautiful!”

Killer heat begins streaming on Prime Video on September 26th.