Ben McKenzie spent years playing characters on television, but his latest role put him in the middle of one of the messiest stories in finance. The actor behind Ryan Atwood on “The O.C.” has now turned his skepticism about cryptocurrency into the documentary “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” a film that began as a three-year journey during the pandemic in 2020.
McKenzie says in the film that “the story of money is one of the oldest and most powerful stories ever told,” and that it is “one that’s still being written today.” Those lines frame a project that grew out of his curiosity while the world was shut down, when he started digging into crypto, interviewed believers and critics, and kept pushing far beyond the joke of the thing.
He was already known for taking on a subject he clearly did not trust. McKenzie testified before Congress about cryptocurrency and later co-wrote the book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.” In the film, he leans into that reputation, but he also treats the subject as something larger than a scam story: a test case for how quickly money narratives can spread when fear, greed and technology meet.
The project took him from his own house to public stages and then overseas. McKenzie described himself as an “econ dork” with a degree in economics, and his research eventually sent him to a 2022 bitcoin conference in Miami and later to El Salvador after it became the first country to add bitcoin to its economy. There he visited the first resident of the planned “Bitcoin City” and also spoke with a fisherman who says he is being forced off land his family has lived on for generations to make way for the project.
That is where the film’s argument gets sharper. McKenzie’s documentary includes the people who believe in crypto’s promise, but it also shows the cost of that belief when it reaches real land and real lives. The El Salvadorian president calls the country “a shining beacon on a hill, or rather, on a volcano,” while McKenzie uses the same trip to show how those dreams look from the ground.
His obsession with the subject did not stay confined to interviews and research. McKenzie says he drove his wife, Morena Baccarin, crazy with the fixation, and even brought one of his kids on camera, asking, “Do you know what we’re doing?” The child’s answer — “You’re trying to make fun of people who use cryptocurrency” — lands like a warning and a punchline at the same time.
The film also reaches into the highest and lowest points of crypto’s recent history. McKenzie interviewed Gerard Butler about bitcoin investing and sat down with Sam Bankman-Fried for an on-camera interview before he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, while holding a cup that said “fraud investigator.”
McKenzie’s route into the project started with a friend who had already given him the worst financial advice he ever received. His college buddy Dave introduced him to bitcoin, after once steering him toward stock in a medical company that quickly went belly up. That mix of bad advice, hard-earned skepticism and genuine curiosity now sits at the center of a film that does not pretend crypto is going away. It shows why McKenzie kept chasing the story, and why he believes the money game is still being written in real time.
