Hollywood star-turned-skeptic releases trailer for anti-crypto doc

Ben McKenzie, a Hollywood actor known for his roles on television shows including Gotham and The OC, has released the trailer for a documentary about cryptocurrency featuring interviews with actors and former executives at once-prominent trading platforms.

Released by international sales agency and distributor The Forge on Tuesday, the trailer for the documentary, titled “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” showed McKenzie saying cryptocurrency was “pretty stupid” and the actor’s journey to advocating against the industry. The film features footage from 2022 of former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried and former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky before their respective companies collapsed, as well as interviews with celebrities including Morena Baccarin and Gerard Butler.

The trailer shows McKenzie directly asking SBF how much he had donated to politicians; it lists among its cast El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who advocated for the country to adopt Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender in 2021. Notably, Butler said in an interview with McKenzie that he had “made a ton of money” investing in crypto but didn’t “actually know anything about it.”

McKenzie shifted from working in Hollywood to speaking out against issues in the crypto industry after learning about the technology in 2020. After the collapse of FTX in 2022, he testified at a US Senate hearing investigating the downfall of the exchange, calling the industry “the largest Ponzi scheme in history.”

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Cointelegraph reached out to the filmmakers for comment on the content of the interviews with SBF and Bukele but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Bankman-Fried still exploring a potential presidential pardon or appeal

The former FTX CEO is serving a 25-year sentence in US federal prison following his 2023 conviction on seven felony counts related to the misuse of customer funds at the exchange. However, Bankman-Fried has two potential paths to early release.

Shortly after his 2024 sentencing, SBF’s lawyers filed an appeal to overturn the conviction and sentence. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals had not released any decision as of Wednesday.

In addition, Bankman-Fried has been lobbying US President Donald Trump through social media posts praising his actions, often on matters unrelated to crypto. However, Trump said in a January interview that he was not considering a pardon for the former CEO.

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