The Unlikely Crypto Crusader
Ben McKenzie began the pandemic like many men in their mid-40s: hunched over a computer screen, late at night, regressing to behaviors that they thought they had left behind in college. While other men rediscovered a love for first-person shooters or map-based strategy games, McKenzie, a veteran actor and mainstay on both critically acclaimed and globally famous TV shows, found a vice far more perverse and confusing: he stayed up late thinking about the economy.
Specifically, McKenzie had become obsessed with cryptocurrency—the online infrastructure of alternative forms of money backed by a system of computer code that promised to revolutionize the world, or, failing that, make a lot of people very rich. For months, McKenzie poured money into dubious online exchanges and traditional markets alike, falling back on his undergraduate degree in economics and specifically trying to “short” companies he thought were overvalued or built on fraud. Many of his fellow celebrities, meanwhile, couldn’t get enough, and as McKenzie watched Matt Damon, the Kardashians, Larry David, Snoop Dog and others cutting ads for crypto exchanges, his skepticism deepened.
“If there’s one thing I did know right off the bat it’s that Matt Damon didn’t know fuck all about crypto,” McKenzie says. “As I looked into it, it just got worse and worse and worse.”
From The O.C. to the Senate Floor
In his new documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You For Money—in theaters April 17—McKenzie has recorded both his initial journey into the world of cryptocurrency and his subsequent obsession over the fraud that he claims is at its heart. McKenzie is, for the culturally ignorant, most famous for the first major role of his career: four seasons as Ryan Atwood, a bad boy with a heart of gold on the generational-defining show The O.C. Since his stint as Atwood, McKenzie has thrown himself into two other major roles on network television, as a rookie cop on the gritty police drama Southland and Detective James Gordon on the Batman-inspired WB show Gotham, neatly dividing his life into eras of devotion to one role.
Everyone is Lying to You For Money is McKenzie’s newest role, and he plays himself in scripted segments and re-enactments with the same fervor: dipping into lurid crypto conventions in Miami and a surreal encounter with a true believer living in squalor on the site of a promised “Bitcoin City” in El Salvador. It’s a condensed look, in some ways, at what happened to thousands of families over the past few years: a father with a new obsession in online money, his emotions riding on the performance of a graph that periodically appears on his phone.
The Nature of Trust
“I really believe strongly that what crypto represents is quite bad for the world,” McKenzie tells me. “It misunderstands money and the nature of all these social contracts, and the nature of trust. Money is trust.”
McKenzie’s obsession with crypto didn’t start with these ideals. Rather, in the book and film, he credits his entry into the world of crypto to a conversation with his friend Dave Miller, a college friend who, McKenzie says, once gave him the “worst financial advice of his life.”
“I would argue it was not financial advice, it was a stock tip from a 26-year-old struggling actor living in a guest house,” Miller tells me. Still, early in the pandemic, Miller admits that he suggested McKenzie check out Bitcoin. In the film, Dave is used as the proxy for the hoodwinked public—trying to suck in a buddy who he knows has a bit of cash but is always looking to get a little more.
What Comes Next?
There are signs now that McKenzie’s next act may be beyond crypto. The conceit, however, is the same: use this fame that was foisted on him at such a young age, and make it worth something. For now, McKenzie is working on a new show with network-producer legend David E. Kelley, a legal drama and political thriller set in a world of shady lawyers, landlords and bureaucrats, inspired by the real-world corruption of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The show is still in its early stages, which means that McKenzie is fully in the throes of a new obsession: shadowing lawyers and interviewing bureaucrats. A new era of Ben McKenzie might be on the horizon.