The actor Ben McKenzie is sitting in the den of his Brooklyn Heights townhouse, summarizing a 24-part MIT lecture series about the blockchain by SEC chair Gary Gensler. “Gensler talks about finance being the intermediation of risk and capital,” he explains before whipping me through the reliability of state-held currencies, the dangers of speculation, and the history of encryption from the Merkle tree (an early method of computer encryption) to ethereum (the biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin). Once he gets through the three sides of the fraud triangle and the definition of securities, he takes a sip of tea. “It’s really good that you’re here talking to me,” McKenzie says. “Now my wife can say, ‘Thank God, for one day, I don’t have to listen to this shit.’”

It’s a February afternoon and 15 years to the day since The O.C.’s final episode aired, marking the end of McKenzie’s run as Ryan Atwood, the brooding, tank-top-clad hottie who captured the hearts and hormones of a generation of tweens. Today, McKenzie is angling for a return to the Zeitgeist, this time as a reluctant public intellectual. He’s joining the growing ranks of Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent figures who are talking about crypto, but instead of hawking NFTs (like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Tom Brady) or shilling for various crypto exchanges during the Super Bowl (like LeBron James and Larry David), McKenzie is playing the role of the lone Cassandra, a voice of dissent in the celebrity crypto-endorsement industrial complex. Since last year, he has been writing and tweeting about how celebrities boosting the industry don’t know what they’re talking about — except for maybe him. He recently announced he is writing a book with New Republic journalist Jacob Silverman for Abrams Press titled Easy Money, a kind of “Big Short for crypto,” as McKenzie describes it.

His obsession began with boredom. Gotham, the Batman prequel show he starred in after The O.C. and the crime drama Southland, ended in 2019, and McKenzie had just wrapped a Broadway play when he and his wife, Gotham’s Morena Baccarin, found themselves out of work in the pandemic. After Baccarin gave birth to their son, Arthur, in March 2021 (they also have a 5-year-old, Frances, and Baccarin has an 8-year-old son with her ex), McKenzie was still figuring out his next project when a college buddy named Dave talked to him about bitcoin: “You should get into this, dude,” McKenzie recalls Dave saying. The conversation sent him down the crypto rabbit hole. He watched the Gensler series and listened to podcasts and read a million articles. When he emerged, he told Dave, “I don’t know, man, this doesn’t seem right.”

Before he began his TV career, McKenzie studied economics and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. To him, cryptocurrency appeared brazenly shady, operating largely without regulation and ballooning in a pandemic economy awash with cash. He became obsessed with one of the few criminal investigat