Ben McKenzie On His Crypto Documentary And Trump Family Coin Cash

Actor-director Ben McKenzie isn’t afraid to make a bold statement. For instance, when we meet up at a hotel in Miami to discuss his debut documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, he’s wearing a blue baseball cap stitched with the words “Make Lying Wrong Again.”

That clear reference to a certain occupant of the White House and his political movement is by no means McKenzie’s most provocative statement on matters of urgent relevance. His new documentary, which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles, takes on another sacred cow (or sacred bull, if you prefer the language of Wall Street): reverence for cryptocurrency. In short, he views crypto as a scam.

“Crypto really only has two use cases that I’ve seen, which is gambling and crime,” he tells me over a double espresso at the JW Marriott. “There are all these speculative cryptocurrencies that would include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the 20,000 other coins out there, like Fart Coin and Trump Coin, Melania Coin, CumRocket — my personal favorite. They’re just gambling devices. You’re betting the price is going to go up or down. You’re probably going to lose because there’s a lot of insider trading and self-dealing.”

McKenzie believes ordinary people don’t have a realistic way to make money off crypto speculation because super-wealthy players manipulate coin values to their advantage.

“The insiders own the vast majority of these coins, sometimes billions of coins. The supplies for non-Bitcoin is unlimited; it’s whatever they want to put in the [computer] code,” McKenzie contends. He points to the shady practice of “wash trading,” which Nice Actimize defines as “a form of market manipulation where a trader creates the illusion of trading activity by simultaneously buying and selling the same security.”

In the crypto world, McKenzie asserts, wash trading works this way: “You can set up as many accounts as you like and the pseudonymity of the blockchain obscures who’s buying what from whom. And so, you can basically just trade [back and forth with yourself]… and it looks like the price of the thing is going up, but it’s like three card monte or something. You go to put your real money in and [wealthy coin holders] sell to you. And if they bid the price up enough, they’re just waiting for there to be enough real money in the system to [cash out].”

McKenzie earned a degree in economics from the University of Virginia before he became an actor – starring in The O.C., Southland, and Gotham among other series and films. During the pandemic when acting opportunities were put on hold, he did a deep dive into crypto which resulted in a 2023 book he wrote with Jacob Silverman, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.

It’s a safe bet President Trump and his family haven’t read his book, or if they did, they ignored it. In 2024, the president posted on social media, “I promised to Make America Great Again, this time with crypto. #WorldLibertyFi is planning to help make America the crypto capital of the world!”

World Liberty Financial issued a so-called “stablecoin” pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, as well as a “governance token” (an Abu Dhabi royal bought a 49 percent stake in the firm for $500 million, per the Wall Street Journal). The president also licensed his name to the $TRUMP meme coin. Forbes magazine says Trump has made $1.2B off his crypto ventures to date.

“I did not predict that Trump was going to make this turn to crypto because he had previously called it a scam in 2021,” McKenzie says. “Until he could figure out how to get his cut… He realized the amount of money he could make and, I think, maybe the power of using the crypto faithful to get them into his [political] coalition, to get the crypto lobby and industry to give him money — because they have so much money now, it’s really staggering.”

The director continues, “It’s deeply fitting that a sort of fraudulent currency is now being foisted upon us, sold to us by a convicted fraudster president. And the industry, which was supposed to be a reaction to the excesses of the government and Big Brother and the state, now is benefiting wildly from the most powerful man in the government giving it his blessing and now must stay in his good graces in order to keep the thing going.”

Lending credibility to McKenzie’s crypto critique, he saw through Sam Bankman-Fried long before others did — including many members of Congress who were only too happy to accept donations from the founder of the crypto exchange FTX. McKenzie set up an interview with SBF at the height of his wealth and prestige and poked holes in the kingpin’s arguments in favor of crypto.

“It was probably the strangest hour of my life,” McKenzie says of his sit-down with Bankman-Fried in Manhattan. “I prepared as extensively as I could by watching interviews with him, what he might say to any particular question and what might be my rebuttal, and can we get to a deeper truth beyond the talking points? Because he was really just repeating talking points over and over… Many members of the financial press were just taking it, just accepting whatever he was saying uncritically… It was doing a disservice to the public.”

It wasn’t until well after McKenzie’s encounter with SBF that the latter’s crypto empire collapsed. Bankman-Fried was eventually charged with securities fraud, money laundering and other alleged crimes. He’s serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison.

There are many humorous moments in the film (including running jokes at McKenzie’s expense about people constantly identifying him with The O.C. and nothing else from his acting career). Barbs are aimed at Matt Damon, Tom Brady, and Larry David for making pro-crypto TV commercials.

“Never heard anything from any of these folks,” McKenzie notes. “The point is not obviously to single any one individual out per se, but by the same token — no pun intended — If I’m trying to fight this, essentially, public relations campaign up against a very massive foe, the multi-trillion dollar crypto industry — it’s not that big, but that’s what they claim it to be — sort of the best tool at my disposal is humor, is mocking them. It’s incredibly powerful if done correctly, and certainly not just me alone. I mean, the Matt Damon South Park episode is really fantastic. If you haven’t seen that or haven’t seen it in a while, it’s worth a rewatching. But I want to call them out, and none of it’s personal. Personally, I felt like they should have apologized and given the money back or given it to the victims or whatever. That’s what I would have liked to have seen done.”

A throughline in the film is McKenzie’s relationship with his wife, actress Morena Baccarin, and their young kids. She appears supportive of her husband’s crypto investigation yet can’t help rolling her eyes on occasion at the zeal of his pursuit.

“It’s definitely a series of conversations between Morena and me,” that culminated in the family’s participation, he says. “At the end of the day, I feel comfortable where we landed. We asked our children who was comfortable; one of them really wanted to be in it, one of them didn’t… I hope I don’t have some staggering therapy bill later. But the reason that we ended up doing that is that I had all this footage that didn’t really have a narrative thread to it because it was interviews with fraudsters and Senate testimony… But who’s journey are we on? What are we watching? And the obvious was, well, it’s me. And okay, if it’s me, then what do people know about me? The O.C. So, make fun of yourself first and kind of be merciless and then hopefully they’re on your side or at least open to being on your side and then tell them a fun story.”

He adds, “The idea was, once we sort of settled on the structure, make it as funny as possible at the top, and then kind of, if you’ll excuse the phrase, ‘kick them in the nuts’ at the end, because you’re only going to get to that place where you’re able to earn the interest of the audience in this thing, if they’ve been entertained at the beginning. So hopefully we walked that line.”