Around the same time Ben McKenzie got interested in cryptocurrency and the hype surrounding it, he found himself reading his young daughter a bedtime story – The Emperor’s New Clothes. He looks across the table to his daughter, who has been brought along for today’s interview. “Do you remember this?” She looks up from her iPad and smiles. “I’d forgotten that the tailor’s trick is to appeal to ego and status worship,” says McKenzie. This was 2021, and cryptocurrency was everywhere in the US at the time. This encrypted, decentralised digital currency, as the TV ads, social media accounts and celebrity endorsements told everyone, was the way to get rich, and promised to be the future of money. Get in now, was the message, before it was too late.
He couldn’t avoid seeing parallels with the bedtime story – that it relied on people buying into an idea that, he suspected, may prove to be a mirage. Getting to the part when it was a child who calls out the truth of the emperor’s “clothes”, he had a thought: maybe I’m that child. “I mean, what do I know?” he says now, with a laugh. McKenzie is an actor, a former teen heart-throb known for his role in the mid-2000s drama The OC and who recently starred in the superhero crime TV series Gotham. Even with his 20-plus-year-old economics degree, he seemed an unlikely anti-crypto crusader. “But when in life do you have a chance to have an adventure?” he says. “What did I have to lose?”
