There’s a moment at the start of Ben McKenzie’s film documentary on cryptocurrency when he strides across a desert scene. He is in Iraq, it seems, one of the first places “where money was invented”. You think you’re in for a lecture on economics, then the camera pulls back and you see a very American-looking petrol station. This is, it turns out, Texas, and McKenzie is making a sly point: not everything is as it seems.

That sets the tone for Everyone is Lying to You For Money, a semi-comic chronicle of McKenzie’s crusade against bitcoin and its ilk. Over 90 minutes, he rails against an invention that he believes has tricked an awful lot of people.

“Crypto can’t actually do anything in the real world, except illegal activity that you wouldn’t do otherwise,” McKenzie tells The Sunday Times over a video call last week. “At best, you’re just transferring money, real money, between different players — and some people are going to win, some people are going to lose. The problem is, the game you’re playing is not fair. You’re playing in an unregulated, unlicensed casino, effectively.”

The actor in his new documentary. His campaign work led him to testifying in front of the US Senate in December 2022

BEN MCKENZIE

BEN MCKENZIE

There’s plenty more of this in his film, which makes its debut at the inaugural SXSW festival in London on June 6. McKenzie, 46, makes his argument doggedly in a series of interviews with some of the key figures in the crypto world — many of whom come unstuck when asked even basic questions about its utility. But who exactly is McKenzie to make the case?

Well, he’s “that guy off The OC”, as the film enjoys telling us. Texan-born McKenzie shot to stardom in his early twenties playing the troubled Ryan Atwood in the flashy California-set teen drama. He followed this up with credible roles in cop drama Southland* *and Batman prequel series Gotham. But it’s The OC that casts the longest shadow. McKenzie seems, well, OK with The OC; his film plays clips from interviews with him over the years in which everyone wants to quiz him about his Orange County days.

“To be a teen idol, it’s difficult — it’s a blessing and a curse,” he says. “It’s a blessing that you have this amazing job and some people know who you are, but it is a challenge to overcome in terms of reinventing yourself.” Everyone is Lying to You For Money is in on the joke that he is an unlikely challenger to the tech bros. “We really wanted to just get that out in front, make fun of myself; hopefully it endears me to the audience,” he says.

McKenzie with Adam Brody in the teen drama The OC in 2003

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And with Shawn Hatosy in Southland, which ran for five series from 2009

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Critics will say this is a case of an under-employed actor straying out of his lane. But McKenzie is slightly more qualified than many of the people actually buying bitcoin; he has a degree in economics, for one thing. His interest in crypto was sparked during lockdown, when, bored at home, he began researching the industry. He went public as a crypto sceptic, attracting vitriol from its fans. This led to him appearing on TV and testifying in front of the US Senate in December 2022. He published a book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, in 2023.

Along the way, McKenzie hired a small film crew to trail him as he meets crypto evangelists. Perhaps the film’s key scene is an interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, conducted months before the crypto exchange collapsed in a blaze of publicity in November 2022; Bankman-Fried was charged the following month and later sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. McKenzie recalls the encounter as “awkward and strange”. “He doesn’t answer questions in a way that feels coherent, or true.”

The film includes an interview with Sam Bankman-Fried

BEN MCKENZIE

The implosion of FTX suggested that the crypto bubble had burst. Then Donald Trump came to power, selling his own coin and slashing regulations. Some of Trump’s key allies, including JD Vance, appeared at a major crypto conference in Las Vegas last week; Nigel Farage was also there. And Bitcoin keeps hitting a record high. “If you got in early — basically, prior to 2021 — then you’ve seen the value of your bitcoin rise enormously. But that doesn’t prove anything, really,” McKenzie says.

• Trump’s firm plans to invest billions in cryptocurrencies. Why?

Trump’s embrace of crypto only makes the film more urgent, he adds. “His re-election, his embrace of crypto, his dismantling of consumer protections and banking regulations … It’s worrying. My fear now is that the risk has become systemic.” By which he means banks and companies have cryptocurrency on their balance sheets. He cites the example of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed in 2023 having dabbled in crypto.

Everyone is Lying to You For Money was self-funded by McKenzie — although he says part of the cost was recouped by placing a bet that the crypto market would fall, which it did during production. He hopes the film will be picked up by a streaming platform. After that, he plans to return to directing and acting.

Will bitcoin crash back to zero? McKenzie says: “It can’t sustain itself for ever. Eventually you just run out of new people to put money in.” He adds: “A Ponzi scheme, which I still believe crypto is at its heart, can last for a very long time. Bernie Madoff ran his Ponzi scheme for decades.”

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One of the most striking moments in the documentary is when McKenzie interviews people who lost money in the collapse of crypto exchange Celsius in 2023. They are all, to a man — and they all seem to be men — still loyal to crypto. “It’s a belief system, ultimately,” he says. “It’s really not ever going to go away, which is terrifying to me if you believe that ultimately, at best, it’s a speculative bubble, and at worst, it’s a speculative bubble predicated on fraud and criminal activity.”

But that’s enough about crypto. Time for some questions on The OC. What do his former cast mates make of his reinvention as scourge of the tech world? “I would imagine they were surprised,” he says. Would Ryan, his character in the drama, have dabbled in bitcoin? “No, I think he would have punched those guys out,” McKenzie smiles. “Somebody was saying Adam Brody’s character would go for it; I’m not sure. Certainly Jimmy Cooper [the stockbroker played by Tate Donovan] would have been into it. Crypto definitely would have been in the ether in Orange County.”