Ben McKenzie on His Crypto Doc ‘Everyone Is Lying to You for Money': A 'Human Story About Trust'

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If you still think of actor Ben McKenzie only as a guy who knows his way around the beautiful people of The O.C. or mainly as the star of Fox series Gotham, think again. Since the pandemic, he has become a vocal critic of cryptocurrency. His New York Times bestseller Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, co-authored with journalist Jacob Silverman, raised eyebrows in 2023. And this week, McKenzie is likely to again cause debate when he world premieres his feature film directorial debut, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, at SXSW London on Friday.
McKenzie wrote and directed the cinematic exposé on the world of cryptocurrency and produced it with Giorgio Angelini. Three years of filming took the star to New York, Austin, Miami, London, and El Salvador.
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The documentary includes interviews with crypto poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried, conducted just months before the FTX founder was indicted on fraud and related charges, and Alex Mashinsky, the former CEO of bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network, as well as celebrities and numerous victims of crypto fraud. No surprise then that the film screens in a SXSW London strand called 'Collisions.'
'One may be skeptical when reading that a famous actor slash former teen heartthrob did a big career pivot into cryptocurrency, but Ben McKenzie's directorial debut is swift to poke fun at the stereotype,' highlights a SXSW London synopsis of the film. 'The result is not only hugely informative but wildly entertaining and a galvanizing takedown of the crypto-world.'
McKenzie calls the film 'a true indie movie,' explaining: 'There's no studio, there's no finance. I'm the financier.' Sales of the movie are being handled by Amy Beecroft at Verve. This week, the new multihyphenate McKenzie will get to unveil it to the public in London.
Ahead of the world premiere of Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, he discussed with The Hollywood Reporter how he made the film, its tone and key messages, why he called the crypto industry 'the largest Ponzi scheme in history' in his testimony in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and the role of celebrities in supporting cryptocurrency.
I read you have an undergraduate degree in economics, but you are most widely known as an actor. When and how did you get interested in the topic of cryptocurrency?
It was pandemic boredom, mainly, and a slow-moving midlife crisis, perhaps. I was super happy with my personal life. I'd met my now-wife [Morena Baccarin] on Gotham, and we'd started a family, and I was trying to figure out what the next chapter of my career was going to be. I'd made a lot of television, three different shows for 15 years, and I did a play on Broadway. I was getting my mojo back. But the play closed on March 2, 2020, and the next week, everything shut down. There was a pilot I was going to do that went away. I was having an existential crisis that I think so many of us were having. And then a buddy of mine reached out to tell me that I should buy Bitcoin because it was going up and was in the news.
And you said?
I was like: 'I'm not going to buy it, but tell me more.' It was a confluence of things. I was looking for something new to do. I had all this time on my hands. I had this [economics] degree that was 20 years old that I hadn't used, and then I just became fascinated by it. Hopefully, what will come through in the film is that it's not at all about technology, because the technology of crypto is actually quite old. It's a human story about trust and belief systems.
Crypto is really just a story, I would argue, rather than a real thing. There isn't any physical, material world in crypto. It's just pieces of code on ledgers called blockchains. So it's really a human story about my obsession, the people that I've met, the lying and the cheating, and the Sam Bankman-Frieds of it all.
Why did he even agree to talk to you for the film?
Yeah, I was fascinated that Sam Bankman-Fried agreed to an interview like that, even though he must have known that Jacob Silverman and I were writing a book about cryptocurrency and fraud. It was in our Twitter profiles. I couldn't really figure out why he agreed to it. That's either extreme confidence or extraordinary stupidity, or some combination.
The way I've sort of come to understand it, and I'll never know, of course, but I'm talking about this in the film: Fraudsters don't view themselves the same way as other criminals. Other criminals who commit violent acts are perhaps more at ease with their moral failings. Fraudsters perceive themselves as legitimate businessmen. They rationalize their behavior. And so I think Sam, at the time, had convinced himself that what he was doing was totally fine. What you see in the interview is that I challenge him just a little bit. 'What does crypto do? Explain to me what it does!' And his thing kind of just collapses in on itself. It's funny and sad at the same time, and sort of uncomfortable. Because I had worked my way up the chain and talked to everybody – regular folks, other CEOs, Alex Mashinsky, who is also in jail now – and no one had explained crypto to me. So, I figured, well, now I'm at the top – Sam is sort of the most public face of the whole thing, surely he can explain it to me. And it was about as hollow as it can get. Talk about a post-truth world. It's a very amusing example of that.
Whenever I talk to people, the majority bought crypto because their friends bought it, and they saw it going up, and maybe they had some extra money, and they probably lost it. People I have talked to almost always say the same thing if they're not into crypto: 'I don't understand it, and it seems kind of scammy.' And I'm like: 'It's not you. It's the crypto. You're not the crazy one.' If it doesn't make sense to you, it's because it has the language of a multi-level marketing scheme, where the words that they use don't mean what they mean in regular English. Stablecoins aren't stable. Currencies aren't currencies. Decentralized means centralized. It's to sort of indoctrinate you. It's going to self-select. The number of people who are going to keep going and believing in it are going to believe in it no matter what, and the rest of us are going to be like: 'This is weird. This doesn't make sense.'
Are you arguing that crypto is a self-perpetuating model and nobody's to blame? And how do you see the role of celebrities who have endorsed crypto? You have been critical of them.
There's plenty of blame to go around. I don't think the celebrities are the root of the problem. I view them as the megaphone that's necessary. As the Ponzi scheme gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you need more and more famous people to keep selling it. When I entered the fray in 2021, 2022, that was the crypto Super Bowl, where every ad was a crypto ad. In the doc, there are plenty of famous folks who get lightly roasted. I don't ascribe intentionality to their participation in what I view as a Ponzi scheme. I think for the most part, it's depressingly simple. They were paid in real dollars to convince you to take your real dollars and turn them into something else. They're not paid in crypto, they're paid in U.S. dollars. And what was so unsettling to me at the time was that celebrities have always shown products. There's nothing wrong with that. My wife has done it. Celebrities have sold products since there have been celebrities. It makes sense. I totally get it. But crypto is a different kind of thing, because it's a financial product. This isn't soap, this isn't clothing. This is something that you're supposed to make money on. It's an investment, and the celebrities didn't understand what they were selling, in my opinion. Most of them didn't understand anything about it. They listened to the boilerplate talk and learned their lines, basically. But you couldn't convince me that Gwyneth Paltrow knew anything about blockchain technology, or Matt Damon, or any of them. So yeah, there is some light roasting in there.
It was kind of lonely. I was the only one of my celebrity colleagues – maybe there were a couple of others, but I was the most vocal, saying: 'This seems bad, guys, don't do that.' So, it's a way of showing what I was up against at the time.
Did your book co-author Jacob Silverman work on the film with you?
No, he pivoted to his new book, which comes out this fall and which I'm very excited about. It's called Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.
How did you decide on the balance between likely dry financial and technological explanations and entertainment elements in the film?
That was probably the key challenge: how do we keep the story entertaining and not devolve into a lecture or a bunch of charts and a lot of econ dork stuff? I would love that stuff, but I don't think the general public does or should. So we figured out how to do it through humor. The film's a comedy. I mean, it's hilarious that I'm the one doing it. The guy from The O.C. is the one trying to take down this trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Whether I succeed or not, we also kind of joke about.
I did everything I could, got some attention, and maybe didn't really have much of an effect at all. Maybe people still just did whatever they wanted to do. That's funny. We live in an absurd time.
So we kept it playful. If you walk away from the film having been entertained – it's an hour and a half, so you're in, you're out – and you learned that crypto is dumb, great! Yeah, it was super fun. Some graphics we used are 1980s video game-style rather than trying to explain crypto to you. That's where I think things get lost, because it's not really about what it is. It's about the story.
When I wrote this book, I was recording my conversations as I was reporting out the story. And I had other pieces. But when I finished the book in '23, I needed to switch over to: How do I turn this into a proper film with a narrative structure? And that's where we had fun with my trip down the rabbit hole and Morena's view of this. I think is one of the things that's not talked about enough in crypto is just how much women hate listening to men talk about crypto. Guys will just drone on and on and on about it.
You have mentioned the word Ponzi scheme again in our chat, just like in your Senate testimony. In case someone doesn't know the exact definition, why do you like using that word for crypto?
I used it at the Senate hearing to communicate the message as simply and as clearly as possible. So, I wanted to use a word everyone's familiar with: Ponzi scheme. The reason why it accurately describes it is that there is no product with crypto, there isn't a thing, it's not an actual currency, and it's not backed by [physical assets]. If money is trust, these things are trustless. They're based on code. You know that saying, 'If you can't figure out what the product is, you're it!' It's sort of like social media – your attention is the product.
I interviewed people who were victims of one of the scams, Celsius. And what was interesting about it was hearing their stories and finding common ground, but also asking them at the end of the film, 'Do you still believe in cryptocurrency?' Some of these people have lost their life savings. But every single person still believes in it. Every single person who was a victim, who volunteered to be interviewed, said that. It varies person to person, but they can now acknowledge that Celsius was a scam, but believe that Bitcoin is different. I think that's really interesting. It's really more of a story about belief.
How much do you discuss definitions and issues of Bitcoin versus crypto in general in the film?
I talk about it in the book, but it's too in the weeds for the film.
It's interesting that people have clung to Bitcoin. I think in part that is because the other stories have fallen apart. I mean, the Trump coin is a perfect example of just how shady and awful the whole thing is. The New York Times reported on this: about 800,000 people have lost money in their wallets on it, but 50 people made $10 million or more. That's exactly how crypto works. It's like you're gambling, and you might win, but you're probably going to lose – you are very likely to lose. And the people who make the money are usually involved in the enterprise. It's just rife with fraud and abuse. And that's really the story that I wanted to concentrate on.
Since you mentioned the financial benefit of a small group, I want to ask you about technology oligarchs, or 'the tech bros,' such as Elon Musk, who have been seen as being close to the political elite in various countries, including the U.S. How timely is your film given debates around that issue?
It is timely. I feel that's bad for the world, but good for the film. I was worried that I was going to be too late by the time I'd finished the film, since all these crypto guys had gotten arrested, and a lot of them were in prison, and the price had crashed. But then, in a way that I never could have predicted, Trump was re-elected. He's embraced crypto fully, and so it's back up, and it's back in the news.
How did you enjoy writing and directing the film? Could we see you do more of that sort of work in addition to acting?
It was actually much, much harder than I thought, but I do love it, and I would love to direct again. I plan to direct again. There is no specific plan, but a goal. It's been really rewarding to watch both the book and the film start with just an idea and go all the way through to the end.
Is there anything else you would like to highlight?
I think the film is timely for all the reasons we mentioned. But at its core, it's about trust, and it's about human beings. There's this fantasy that we can replace something that is inherently human, trust, with technology and with computers and with these fictitious currencies. That's a lie. We can't do it because it doesn't work that way. I can't trust this computer. It's a piece of machinery. I can trust you. I can trust the people that built the machinery or not, and so at the end of the day, I think it's really about coming together and finding common ground and finding and rebuilding the trust that I think is so frayed right now.
We're so divided, or at least that's the appearance online. My experience meeting folks in person, even people that I completely disagree with on crypto, was that most of it was entirely pleasant. I think that's really worth reflecting upon. That's something I reflect upon a lot. Let's get outside of our information silos! Let's get out! Let's get offline and into the real world and take care of each other!
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