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Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle in The Altruists Netflix
watercooler moment
What you need to know about The Altruists on Netflix
The series stars Irish actor Anthony Boyle.
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED was once the ‘poster boy of crypto’, working alongside his on-again, off-again girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
So how did the extremely smart pair end up in court, with Bankman-Fried accused of stealing billions?
That’s the story that’s being told in the buzzy upcoming Netflix series The Altruists.
Here’s everything you need to know about it.
Who are this couple?
Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison were two idealistic 20-somethings who got into crypto believing that it could be the future of finance. The pair aimed towards an altruistic career, and in 2017 Bankman-Fried co-founded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. In 2019, he founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange.
Ellison and Bankman-Fried had worked together and bonded over effective altruism; in 2019, Ellison came on board to work at Alameda. By 2022, Ellison was its sole CEO. Both Bankman-Fried and Ellison were spotlighted as hotshots in their field.
But it wasn’t long before things went stunningly wrong. Questions were raised about the relationship between Alameda and FTX, and as Netflix puts it:
In 2024, cryptocurrency world fixtures Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison were each convicted of various criminal fraud and conspiracy charges, with US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan declaring that the two had committed the “greatest financial fraud ever perpetrated in this country”.
Yikes. Tell us more.
The series was inspired by New York Magazine’s reporting on the collapse of FTX. (Yes, quite a lot of films and TV series are based on reported articles these days – for example, The Lost Children of Tuam was optioned from a New York Times article about Catherine Corless.)
According to the creator of The Altruists, Graham Moore (who won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film The Imitation Game):
From the very beginning, I was so fascinated by both Sam’s and Caroline’s real stories. I’m not nearly a good enough writer to create characters as fascinating as either Sam Bankman-Fried or Caroline Ellison.
One of our goals was to show both Sam and Caroline as very real people — real 26, 28-year-olds who were suddenly thrust into this position where there are billions of dollars riding on their every decision.
Moore’s co-showrunner and co-writer is Jacqueline Hoyt (The Underground Railroad). They drew on reporting, research and first-hand accounts of what happened, and the New York Magazine journalists Kevin T Dugan and Jen Wieczner consulted on the series.
“There’s an exciting challenge in trying to tell a story about a group of people, all of whom have either been convicted of fraud or pled guilty to fraud, because it means that all of our main characters — many of whom we spoke to — I don’t think we could consider any of them unbiased narrators of their own stories,” Moore told Tudum.
Interesting, he also noted that they were trying to put things on the screen that hadn’t already been shown:
If a moment already existed on film somewhere, we weren’t going to show it. We were only going to show you things that by definition couldn’t have been filmed before.
Who is starring in it?
Well, we have two great leads: Irish actor Anthony Boyle (Say Nothing) as Bankman-Fried and Julia Garner (Ozark) as Ellison.
Aside from them, there’s a stacked cast that includes Paul Reiser as Joe Bankman, Jennifer Grey as Sara Fisher Ellison and Hudson Williams as Duncan Rheingans-Yoo.
When can we watch it?
The Altruists begins streaming on Netflix on 19 November.
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