UNABOMBER opens with an explosion — but every detonation starts with a spark.
In 1958, decades before he held the United States hostage in a mail bombing spree as a domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski (played by Jacob Tremblay in the new Netflix film) was a child prodigy starting his first year at Harvard University. He found his spark there: a series of debate studies with Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), an enigmatic figure who introduced young Ted to the treacherous world of the public intellectual.
Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, who wrote the script and serve as executive producers for UNABOMBER, were inspired by Kaczynski’s time at Harvard. “I was listening to NPR and I heard this two-minute-long anecdote,” Greaves says. “It mentioned that Ted Kaczynski had been to Harvard and that he had been involved in these unethical psychological experiments.”
Greaves and Chalsen, both Harvard alumni themselves, split their script into two separate timelines: one exploring what shaped Kaczynski and his beliefs, and the other following the FBI task force that apprehended him in 1996 after he spent nearly two decades evading law enforcement.
“Shailene Woodley’s character Joanne Miller is our entry point into the story,” director Janus Metz says. “She’s the one who starts thinking: ‘Who is the Unabomber? What drives the Unabomber? What’s in his mind?’”
Those are the questions Tremblay honed in on as he approached the character. “I really wanted to make sure I went into this role playing him as a real person with real emotions,” he says.
Read on to dive into the ending of UNABOMBER, now streaming on Netflix.
Greaves and Chalsen started with a foundation of fact: Ted Kaczynski did attend Harvard starting in the late 1950s, and he did participate in experiments led by Professor Henry Murray. Likewise, the FBI storyline in the film is based on the real hunt for the Unabomber, although it consists of a cast of fictionalized FBI agents led by Woodley’s Joanne Miller. “Pretty much every scene in the FBI timeline happened,” Chalsen says. “The characters and their dramatic conflict are what we’re creating there.”
Like the rest of the FBI team in the film, Miller is a fictional character working to hunt down the Unabomber. She’s the only member of the team who believes the secret of the bomber’s identity lies in analysis of his manifesto, not in traditional police work. “The ’90s story is about these FBI agents actually looking at what the Unabomber wrote in order to figure out how his brain works so they could hunt him down, versus what the conventional wisdom was at the time,” Chalsen says.
The relationship between Murray and young Kaczynski, however, is largely rooted in speculation. “That’s definitely inspired by true events,” Chalsen says. “We’re not suggesting that [the real] Ted had this specific relationship with Henry Murray that had all these turns. There’s no evidence of that.”
What there is real-life evidence of is Murray’s enormous personality and bizarre proclivities, including an interest in Moby-Dick author Herman Melville that bordered on obsession.
“It was something that he referenced in class,” Crowe says about his character. “At the beginning of the film, we show you how [Murray] broke down the story [of Moby-Dick], how different perspectives give you different information. And that, of course, is the underlying part of his study, how different individuals respond in certain circumstances.”
Metz knew Crowe was the perfect actor to bring Murray to life, a collaborator capable of conveying charisma and menace in equal doses.
“This was a time at Harvard and in the world of psychology where psychologists were given a lot of credence; there was a lot of curiosity about psychology,” Metz says. “This whole idea about how to understand the human mind — it was a more mechanical approach to science and approach to try to understand human beings.”
“Russell is such a formidable force as a character, as a person, as an actor,” Metz adds. “He steps into the movie and becomes that screen presence of a very grand personality. I was just very, very excited that he was excited about the part.”
Into this morass falls Tremblay’s Kaczynski, already feeling alone and adrift in a world much bigger than he is. Tremblay, who rose to fame as a child actor in films such as Room and Wonder, had a humble view of his assignment in UNABOMBER.
“I’m not really playing the Unabomber,” he says. “I’m just playing a young Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber doesn’t exist yet, so I don’t want to make him seem like a supervillain at that point.”
At this time, young Ted is a troubled 16-year-old who feels totally unprepared for the social circles that his prodigious intellect has pushed him into. Ted has trouble kissing girls, making friends, and eventually even focusing on his classes. Instead, he throws himself full force into Professor Murray’s debate club experiments, forging his parents’ signature for permission.
Ted prepares to debate big ideas, including his own belief that the industrial world has completely failed to make human life better. But the experiments aren’t what he anticipated. Rather than trading rational arguments with an upper-class student, Ted is berated and humiliated with ad hominem attacks. Still he returns again and again, determined to win a game whose rules he doesn’t fully understand.
Ted believes he’s conducting experiments based on the science of debate, but in reality, the experiments are part of a collaboration with the government over potential mind-control techniques.
Murray is joined on the assignment by his partner (both professional and romantic) Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis), a skilled scientist who, like Murray, was also a real-life psychoanalyst who worked at Harvard.
“She was a woman at the top levels of academia in Ivy League universities,” Metz says. “She did some groundbreaking work within that world. We didn’t want Christiana Morgan to feel like just the female assistant to Henry Murray. We wanted her to have gravity in the story as well. I think Annabelle really gives her that.”
Wallis threw herself into the role with as much passion as Morgan brought to the pair’s experiments. “She was a co-creator of the TAT, the Thematic Apperception Test,” Wallis says, referring to the image-association test taken by Ted in his “audition” for the debate club. “I think you’re always inspired by people that you don’t understand, that fascinate you. I think she was that for [Murray], and I think he was that for her. They just had a psycho-spiritual connection that is really from another dimension.”
Together, Murray and Morgan bring their psychological expertise to bear on Ted, befriending him outside their sessions and listening to his pain over feeling separate from the rest of the world — like a Martian, as he describes it. Then Murray and Morgan use what Ted has told them to attack him in a debate, catching him totally off guard. Ted is shattered when he realizes that his ideas have never been the focus of the pair’s experiments. They were interested only in how he held up under extreme stress.
“Henry’s big problem is that, at a certain point he loses his academic objectivity in the pursuit of trying to prove his theories to be true,” Crowe says. “Because of the way these things work, by proving his theories, his funding will continue. That’s one of the things that fascinated me about playing the character, that you could come from such a privileged upbringing, you could have such a goal in academic life, and you could end up being in this place where you lose that objectivity, and you try to force a result.”
Furious at the betrayal, Ted develops a plan to humiliate his tormentors just as they’ve humiliated him. He returns to the experiments again and again, this time refusing to submit, and growing more and more dogmatic in his anti-industrial beliefs. Meanwhile, Morgan tries to convince Murray to stop — but he’s encouraged by letters from his peers lavishing him with praise for his unorthodox experiments.
As Ted’s grades plummet, and he begins to withdraw from friends and family, he joins Professor Murray for one final confrontation. “In the character’s perspective, I was definitely intimidated,” Tremblay says, describing the scene. “We dive into these really intense emotions and we’re both trying to break each other. I had a really good time doing it, even though the emotions were super intense.”
Murray delivers a diagnosis to Ted: schizophrenia. It’s a diagnosis shared by a psychiatrist who interviewed the future Unabomber in prison, but it’s not something Tremblay considered while playing the character. “From Ted’s perspective, it’s absent,” he says. “Murray tries to convince him of it, but when he was in court, he refused to plead insanity.”
So Ted completely rejects Murray’s verdict, before pulling out his trump card. “He’s outsmarted this whole experiment, basically playing into Murray’s hand while having his whole other agenda,” Metz says.
Ted reveals that he has been the one writing letters to Murray, playing with his onetime mentor’s ego like a cat with a mouse. He excoriates the professor for his prideful manipulation of his students and leaves the devastated Murray with a parting gift, which looks like one of the bombs Ted will later mail around the country.
Crowe was delighted to find this other side of Tremblay as a scene partner. “He’s a young man and he’s very open and charming, and we got on very well, but there’s a darkness that he has to bring out and there’s a steel that he has to display,” he says. “So I was unsure about that, but man, when he brought it, he really brought it. I was really impressed.”
Ted’s final message for Murray is a copy of Moby-Dick, with a crucial passage underlined: “however baby man may brag of his science and skill … for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him.” Ted walks off into the night, planning to fight that science and skill with everything he has.
UNABOMBER isn’t told in linear fashion; the film flashes back and forth between Ted’s time as a Harvard student and the nationwide manhunt for him as a wanted criminal. Even the look of the film diverges between these two subplots.
“The timeline of Harvard from the late ’50s, early ’60s is a little richer and warmer tonally,” Metz says. “That was to underscore in a way the warmth and the idealism of Ted. Then with the ’90s, we cut into a more bluish, slightly colder tone. Those parts of the story needed to be a little more chilling, and the color palette became that way.”
The ’90s timeline introduces Joanne Miller (Woodley), an FBI agent struggling with her place on the UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) task force. Miller is diametrically opposed to the Unabomber, but she shares a quality with the young Ted we meet in the film.
“There’s a parallel between her and Ted in the sense that neither one of them are willing to back down from their intuition and their instincts,” Woodley says. “Joanne is a woman in the FBI in the ’90s. There was always something to prove, and there was generally a no far more often than there was a yes.”
So the FBI agrees to release the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto in search of tips — and almost immediately strikes pay dirt. Kaczynski’s brother, David (Matthew Kevin Anderson) and David’s wife, Linda Patrik (Tanya van Blokland), contact the FBI, and show them a letter from Ted, whose diction and sentence structure align almost perfectly with the language of the manifesto. Although it takes her superiors some convincing, Miller knows they’ve found their man.
The raid on the Unabomber’s notorious cabin in the Montana woods is intercut with a scene of young Ted’s final meeting with Professor Murray: the last gasps of Ted’s innocence bleeding into his final moments as a free man.
UNABOMBER speculates that Ted and Murray’s clash was the ultimate tipping point in the young man’s development. “He’s almost like the ugly duckling in the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen,” Metz says. “But then when he wants to become the swan, he is deceived and finds out that Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan have deceived him. That’s when he turns, and that’s when he develops this mentality of saying, ‘Well, I’m going to go and do my thing, and I’m going to turn my back on the world.’”
This context doesn’t excuse Kaczynski’s years of deadly attacks, but it does begin to explain what shaped him. “My perception of him never changed through doing this film just because I always think that harming people and murder is inexcusable,” Tremblay says. “But there’s a lot about his life at Harvard that I didn’t know before going into the project.”
Metz sees Kaczynski, who died in prison in 2023 at 81, and Murray, who died in 1988 at 95, as two sides of the same coin.
“I think the film is about what happens when you’re totally convinced about your own truths and when you’re willing to go to extremes to prove those truths to the world,” he says. “That goes for both Henry Murray and Ted Kaczynski. Murray’s violence is about the people that take part in his experiment. Ted’s violence is on an even more extreme level in the sense that he starts killing people. Taking violent action as a consequence of your beliefs … I think this is a film that documents the tragedy of that.”
UNABOMBER is now streaming on Netflix.
