Ben McKenzie made a career playing the steady guy on television, from Ryan Atwood in The O.C. in 2003 to later turns in Southland and Gotham. Now he is using that same public face to go after an industry he says thrives on confusion, fear and salesmanship.

His documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money was released in April, and it follows a path that began during the pandemic, when McKenzie became interested in cryptocurrency and then, by his own account, turned skeptical. “I’m an actor. I’m also a bullshitter,” he told Esquire. “And these guys are bullshitting us. There’s a lot of people lying to you for money.”

McKenzie, who has an economics degree from the University of Virginia, said the turn came in part by accident. “I had taken edibles and thought it was a good idea,” he said of starting his skeptic era. He later added, “I had to find someone to help me. I took more edibles to summon the courage to DM Jacob Silverman, who had written a very funny article: ‘Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin is a Scam.’”

That message became a collaboration. In 2021, McKenzie began working with Silverman to probe the cryptocurrency industry, and the pair ended up writing Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, which became a New York Times bestseller in 2023. The documentary grew out of that project, with McKenzie financing it with his own cash and then turning the camera on the people and promises that had drawn so much money so quickly.

He said the first day of filming came at the 2022 South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky was also appearing. “I saw Celsius, which was being sued by multiple state regulators, trying to sell people on this scheme. I was like, ‘This is shocking,’” McKenzie said. “I figured, what the hell? I mic’d up and went over to him, and had the most bizarre, hilarious-slash-terrifying conversation where he’s so full of it. Like a used-car salesman. That was our first day, so I felt like I should keep going.”

The documentary also follows people who lost financial footing after investing in Celsius. McKenzie said some of them were still putting money into crypto later, a detail that complicates the easy version of the story in which every victim simply walks away wiser. That is part of what gives his project its edge: it is not only about fraud, but about why fraud keeps finding a new audience.

McKenzie said he does not think about victims the way many people do. “When people are scammed, we judge. We go, ‘You should have known,’” he said. “I don’t look at it that way.” He added that “crypto appeals to people with high, medium, and low financial literacy,” a line that fits both the size of the market and the scale of the damage.

The larger story now has a legal ending as well as a cultural one. Mashinsky, once one of the industry’s best-known pitchmen, is now serving twelve years in federal prison on commodities and securities fraud. McKenzie’s documentary and book reached the problem from the opposite direction: not from the collapse, but from the pitch that made the collapse possible. For McKenzie, the question is no longer whether crypto could be explained. It is whether enough people were willing to believe it before the bill came due.