Former OC actor Ben McKenzie on crusade to take down 'stupid' cryptocurrency

For many millennials, Ben McKenzie is still best known for his role as a troubled teen from the wrong side of the tracks who was adopted by the wealthy Cohen family.

The now 47-year-old actor noted as much in the US Congress, when he appeared before its Senate committee on banking four years ago.

"You can also call me Ryan Atwood from The OC," he quipped.

McKenzie's appearance before the committee highlights the career swerve the Hollywood actor has made since appearing in television shows such as The OC and Gotham.

He is now drawing on his undergraduate studies in economics to publicly criticise one of the highest-profile financial movements of the past decade.

"In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history," he told the US Senate.

Speaking to ABC News, McKenzie explains how he became a crypto cynic and why he has just put out a documentary openly calling the movement "stupid".

The star and director made the film as a follow to the book on cryptocurrency he wrote with journalist Jacob Silverman.

"I had a lot of impostor syndrome about playing this role of investigative journalist," he tells ABC News about making a feature film.

"That's clearly not my training."

Most people know money in the form of currencies such as the Australian dollar or the US greenback.

These are issued by countries and controlled by central authorities like the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Digital or cryptocurrencies propose a different system that is "decentralised" without involvement by states and allowing individual-to-individual transactions.

For proponents such as Kevin O'Leary, who also appeared at the same Congress hearing as McKenzie in 2022, it is a system with "great promise" and "potential".

There has also been a lot of money to be made, with the most famous digital currency, Bitcoin, currently worth about $100,000 per "coin" on financial markets.

Yet Bitcoin has also proved incredibly volatile, with huge swings and crashes as governments dictate policy about it or even as Tesla's Elon Musk tweets musings.

McKenzie got interested during Covid-19, when super-low interest rates and fears of currency devaluation were pushing everyday retail investors into Bitcoin.

"The long and short of it is I was really bored over the pandemic," McKenzie says of his foray into crypto.

"Showbiz was shut down. There wasn't much to do. I have a degree in economics.

"A friend of mine came to me, said I should buy crypto.

"But my buddy, I think we all have this friend who we love dearly, but we wouldn't take financial advice from, that's my buddy Dave for me.

"And that led me down the rabbit hole."

McKenzie did see the allure for members of the public, including himself, who felt cynical about "the outsized power that corporations have over our daily lives".

"I think that's true, largely; maybe not exactly in the way that crypto advocates think."

Yet he soon decided deregulating currencies wasn't the solution to post-global-financial-crisis malaise.

"I think that's really a fiction," he says.

"Transferring the trust that is money from the public sphere to the private sphere seems like a really bad idea."

He decided to "short" cryptocurrency, meaning he invested money betting its price would go down.

That happened in 2022 with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. McKenzie says the short he made was so lucrative, it half-funded his documentary.

Now available for global viewing, Everyone Is Lying To You For Money delves further into what happened in 2022.

McKenzie even secured an interview with one of the most high-profile faces of the 2022 collapse, FTX's founder and now-imprisoned fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The tit-for-tat with the FTX founder unfolds as McKenzie sips from a mug decorated with the words "fraud investigator".

"I was sipping from my fraud mug as Sam was spouting his crypto baloney," McKenzie recalls.

"What I found with Sam Bankman-Fried is he couldn't answer the basic questions at the beginning.

"It was five, six months before everything went kablooey.

"What I wanted to do with the movie is entertain. It's a 90-minute comedy about how stupid this is."

McKenzie also speaks to FTX investors who lost out when a bank run exposed an $11 billion hole in the exchange's accounts.

"Crypto is really only good for gambling, betting the price of this or that crypto is going to go up or down, and, crime," he said.

It also tracks the actor as he ends up in Congress, giving his impassioned speech into their inquiries into the collapse of FTX.

"You need Ryan Atwood to ask these questions?" he notably said to the senators.

Yet McKenzie's cautionary investigation is now being released globally online as Bitcoin continues to be entrenched in global financial systems.

Just this month, Bitcoin surged again as US President Donald Trump and crypto leaders pushed a last-ditch attempt to regulate the industry, known as the Clarity Act.

Trump himself has notably undergone a dramatic shift from being an outspoken critic to now a supporter, even with his own digital currency, TrumpCoin.

"I'm never going to be able to convince people who believe in cryptocurrency that what they believe is not true," McKenzie says.

"But I didn't make the movie for those people."

For those coming fresh into his financial crusade, McKenzie is also still able to entertain queries about his time as a teenage heart-throb.

Reflecting on the show that launched him, McKenzie had a quick answer when asked who in Ryan Atwood's fictional world would have most likely bought crypto.

"[That] would have been Luke," he quips.

For those who never watched the show, Luke Ward was Marissa Cooper's jock boyfriend. Staying in the theme of the show, McKenzie goes further about who might have issued a digital currency.

"Issued would have been Jimmy Cooper, Marissa's dad," he says.

Cooper was investigated by the US fraud agency in season one for embezzling money from his clients' investment portfolios.