The actor, best known for his starring role in “The O.C.,” has become an outspoken critic of a volatile market driven by speculation. Who’s listening? Ben McKenzie, an actor best known for portraying the brooding Ryan Atwood on “The O.C.,” has become an outspoken crypto skeptic.Credit…Eli Durst for The New York Times ROCKDALE, Texas — Ben McKenzie was driving his father’s silver Subaru through Texas farmland, talking in breathless bursts about money: who has it, who needs it, what makes it real or fake. He detailed the perils of cryptocurrency exchanges, the online brokers that sell Bitcoin and Ether to speculators, then delivered a glowing endorsement of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a 700-page book by the economist Thomas Piketty about income inequality and the power of wealthy capitalists.
“If they can make money on it, they’ll do it,” Mr. McKenzie, 43, said as he sped past cattle farms and run-down gas stations one morning in March.
Mr. McKenzie was on his way to Whinstone U.S., a crypto mining operation about an hour outside Austin, where rows of energy-guzzling machines generate new Bitcoins. Over the last six months, as A-list celebrities have shilled for digital currencies and NFTs , Mr. McKenzie, a TV actor best known for his starring role in “The O.C.,” has become an outspoken skeptic. He’s written critically about the #ad for little-known coins that Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram and earnestly asked Reese Witherspoon to stop proselytizing about the metaverse, all while acknowledging that he’s not a financial expert.
“I’m just a former teen idol standing here (alone?) asking people to consider downside risk and the possibility of fraud,” he tweeted in February.
Mr. McKenzie rose to prominence in the early 2000s playing Ryan Atwood, a brooding, musclebound teenager from the wrong side of the tracks who moves in with a wealthy family in Newport Beach, Calif. After “The O.C.” wrapped, he went on to star in two other TV dramas, “Southland” and “Gotham,” both of which ran for five seasons.
But acting work dried up during the pandemic, and like many people, Mr. McKenzie soon found himself sucked down a crypto rabbit hole. After a couple of friends encouraged him to invest, he took a 24-part online course on cryptocurrencies taught by Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (or just “Gary,” as Mr. McKenzie fondly calls him; they’ve never met).
The crypto market seemed tailor-made for fraud, Mr. McKenzie said. He was convinced the skyrocketing valuations of popular coins were fueled by reckless speculation, rather than any practical application of the technology. “It doesn’t do what currencies do,” he said. “It’s not a reliable store of value, unit of account or medium of exchange.”
In August, Mr. McKenzie sent a Twitter DM to Jacob Silverman, a tech writer for The New Republic who had recently published an essay titled “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam.” “I’d love to pick your brain,” the actor wrote. “Feel free to disregard this if it’s all too weird.”
Mr. Silverman, an “O.C.” viewer, was intrigued. He and Mr. McKenzie both live in Brooklyn , and they met for beer and burgers at Henry Public. Mr. McKenzie proposed a book project; Mr. Silverman agreed on the spot. “I started also to understand Ben’s sense of outrage at what he saw and everyday people potentially getting fleeced,” Mr. Silverman said. Abrams Press is planning to publish their book, “ Easy Money ,” in 2023.
Mr. McKenzie said his newfound passion has left friends “supportive but confused,” while his wife, the former “Gotham” star Morena Baccarin, is “just tired of me talking about it.” Mr. McKenzie has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Virginia, and over the years he has occasionally chatted about the intersection of law and finance with his father, Pete Schenkkan, a regulatory lawyer in Austin. Still, Mr. Schenkkan said, he was “astonished” to learn of his son’s crypto fixation. “It was a leap sideways from the rest of his life.”
The project is also a deviation from how many celebrities have approached crypto. Matt Damon appeared in a now-infamous commercial for Crypto.com, a trading platform. Paris Hilton has been hawking NFTs. In an essay for Slate in October, Mr. Silverman and Mr. McKenzie wrote that celebrity endorsements are exposing ordinary consumers to scams such as “rug pulls,” in which an anonymous developer solicits funds from investors and then disappears with the money. “The Hollywoodization of crypto,” they wrote, “is a moral disaster.”
Mr. McKenzie has joined a growing group […]
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