Teen-Soap Star. TV Detective. Crypto Truther. What’s Next for Ben McKenzie?

The Unlikely Financial Investigator

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.”

Then, he hired a camera crew.

From The O.C. to the Frontlines of Fraud

“Ben was like an animal trapped in a cage,” says McKenzie’s wife, the actor Morena Baccarin. “But I applaud his ability to go stir crazy and then actually make something of that time.”

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, while coming back repeatedly to his home life with Baccarin and the children in Brooklyn. 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 Moral Backbone of a Skeptic

McKenzie grew up in Austin, Texas, the child of a lawyer and a poet. “I learned it from my dad too—moral backbone,” McKenzie says. “You had to stand up for yourself or else you’re going to get drowned out.” At 47, McKenzie is still trim and TV-fit, moving around with an easy athleticism. If you’ve seen The O.C., McKenzie is immediately recognizable—his face still boyish and clean-shaven—but not so much that he stands out on the street. He tells me, early on, that he doesn’t really want this to be another piece about how someone who was nominated for multiple Teen Choice Awards got really into cryptocurrency.

That’s a tough ask, because Everybody is Lying to You for Money is, at its heart, a film about how someone who was nominated for multiple Teen Choice Awards got really into cryptocurrency. It’s a film about Bitcoin, of course, and the fraudsters, fake banks, dodgy exchanges, and developing-world despots that have used it to further their own political goals and financial bottom lines. But it’s also a film about Ben McKenzie. Early on in McKenzie’s 2023 book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, which he co-wrote with the journalist Jacob Silverman, McKenzie references the economist Robert Shiller, who wrote about how ponzi schemes and financial or cultural manias can often take off when they’re pushed by a “mildly attractive celebrity.”

“I thought that really describes me,” McKenzie tells me.

The Future Beyond Crypto

McKenzie’s hope, clearly, is that he can use that immediate recognition and relationship with the American audience to put his thumb on the scale against something he sees as one of the most flagrant crimes of our time. “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.”

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, make it worth something. He is, after all, no stranger to political communication. In recent years, McKenzie’s political activism has expanded from crypto into a small but influential role in local New York City politics. 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. A new era of Ben McKenzie might be on the horizon.