Ben McKenzie went from playing on-screen cops to chasing crypto crime in real life, and the pivot now has a documentary of its own. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, built around his investigation into digital currency and fraud, opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles this Friday before expanding wider.
McKenzie, known for Gotham and The O.C., said he came to cryptocurrency during the pandemic with an economist’s curiosity and an actor’s ear for a con. He holds a degree in economics from the University of Virginia, and the deeper he dug, the more he concluded that digital currency was fundamentally unsound and saturated with fraud. He later co-authored Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with Jacob Silverman.
The film’s most important sequence came when McKenzie reached out to Sam Bankman-Fried for an interview and, to his surprise, got a yes without conditions. That on-camera conversation became a key part of the documentary, with McKenzie using his acting skills to present himself at first as credulous, even suggestible. He opened with, “Tell me about this cryptocurrency thing. What’s it all about?” and later pressed Bankman-Fried about his political contributions, a subject that was central to the FTX founder’s rise and to the enthusiasm he generated among many members of Congress.
McKenzie arrived at that interview with a coffee mug bearing his own joke about the work: “Being a fraud investigator is easy. It’s like riding a bike except the bike is on fire, you’re on fire, everything’s on fire.” At a Miami Film Festival Q&A on Saturday, after screening the film, he was asked about the cup and about how far he was willing to go to draw Bankman-Fried out. His answer fit the performance: he did what the role required, then let the footage speak for itself.
The irony is hard to miss. Bankman-Fried was later arrested on fraud and other charges and is now serving a 25 year prison sentence at FCI Terminal Island in San Pedro, CA. McKenzie’s film arrives as the crypto industry continues trying to recast itself in friendlier terms, even as one of its most visible figures sits in prison. Miami, where the screening took place, has also hosted Consensus, a major cryptocurrency conference, for the last several years, making the city an apt backdrop for a story about the distance between crypto’s pitch and its record. McKenzie’s answer, in the end, is already on the screen: the interview that sounded playful at first turned out to be part of a much more serious indictment.
