Yes, that’s Jacob Tremblay playing a young Ted Kaczynski in the new drama UNABOMBER. The actor who burst onto the scene as a winning presence in films like Wonder and Good Boys is all grown up now — and director Janus Metz says he was the only choice for the role of the titular mail bomber.
“I had seen Jacob in [Christian Swegal’s 2025 film] Sovereign, and he was absolutely spellbinding,” Metz says. “I saw a young man who had the will and the capacity to look for something truthful in his performance, to really put himself out there and not let vanity rule.” UNABOMBER follows Kaczynski as a 16-year-old math prodigy at Harvard, while flashing forward to the nationwide manhunt for him.
Joining Tremblay in the film is Academy Award winner Russell Crowe as Professor Henry Murray, the Harvard intellectual who takes young Ted under his wing and changes him for life. Tremblay and Crowe’s offscreen relationship mirrored the one onscreen. “I love learning from him,” Tremblay says. “He has this really great attention to detail; he can notice a lot of things on the page that will fly over most people’s heads. It’s really helped my performance a lot, having a co-star like that.”
The third point of UNABOMBER’s central triangle is Shailene Woodley, who plays the fictional FBI agent Joanne Miller, tasked with bringing Kaczynski to justice during his bombing spree. “There’s a parallel between her and Ted in the sense that neither one of them is willing to back down from their intuition and their instincts,” Woodley says.
Of course, those instincts guide the characters in very different directions. Read on to learn which actors brought that journey to life. UNABOMBER is now streaming on Netflix.
Henry Murray is a Harvard psychology professor who attracts a young Ted Kaczynski into his orbit, with dire consequences. When Ted joins a debate experiment that Murray is hosting, he discovers a dark part of himself that cannot be locked away.
Crowe was one of the first names that came to mind when Metz first read Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves’s UNABOMBER script. “Russell is someone who can portray a character on screen who is extremely charismatic, yet at the same time almost demonic,” Metz says. “As an actor, he can really balance the light and the dark in a very interesting way.”
Tremblay prepared to face off with Crowe by diving deep into his filmography. “I went back and I watched all of his films,” he says. “All of his work is so, so good. You can never get tired of watching him. So to be with him on set is something else.”
A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator, The Insider, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, American Gangster, L.A. Confidential, The Nice Guys, The Quick and the Dead
Young Ted Kaczynski is a child prodigy trying to find a place for himself in the hallowed halls of Harvard University. He thinks he finds it in Henry Murray’s class, but fate has other plans.
Tremblay tapped into his own experience as a child actor to play fish-out-of-water Ted. “My goal in all of my projects is I just want it to feel real,” he says. “I can draw from my own personal experiences of what it feels like to be involved with a career where I’m surrounded with a lot of people who are older than me — and that feeling of not fitting in a bit.”
Metz and Tremblay worked together to build a portrait of Kaczynski as a young man. “I think the psychology of Ted Kaczynski and the Unabomber was really at the core of trying to understand where this character was coming from and his path toward radicalization,” Metz says. “I think it’s also why this character is so relevant for the world we live in today.”
Room, Sovereign, Wonder, Good Boys, The Book of Henry, Doctor Sleep, Luca, The Life of Chuck, The Predator
Joanne Miller is one of the FBI agents who finds herself on the trail of the Unabomber during his bombing campaign in the early 1990s. She pushes the department to focus more on the Unabomber’s manifesto — and specifically, the ideas within.
Joanne, a fictionalized character, finds herself spending more time than she might like inside the mind of a killer. “She has to seek the truth — not her truth, not Ted’s truth, but the truth,” Woodley says. “[She has to] look at that truth from all perspectives and all sides of the coin in order to understand how Ted arrived at that truth so that she could also arrive at it — even though they were coming from completely different lenses.”
Metz viewed Emmy winner Woodley’s performance as the fulcrum point of the film. “Shailene’s character is our entry point into the story,” he says. “She’s the one who starts thinking about who the Unabomber is, what drives the Unabomber, what’s on his mind.”
Big Little Lies, The Descendants, The Spectacular Now, The Fault in Our Stars, Snowden, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Divergent
Christiana Morgan is Henry Murray’s professional partner, a Harvard psychologist who joins him in the experiments that will change Ted’s life.
“She was a pioneer in American psychology, a pioneer in female psychology,” Wallis says of her real-life character. “She was the muse to Carl Jung; he called her his pioneer woman. She inspired a lot of his lectures into the feminine psyche. She was ahead of her time and just such an incredible force.”
Metz was adamant that Morgan not slip into the background of the film. “She was a student of Jung, but because she was a woman, her work was never quite recognized,” Metz says. “It was quite important that we got someone in to portray Christiana Morgan who could fill those shoes. We didn't want her to feel like the female assistant to Henry Murray. We wanted her to have gravity in the story as well, and I think Annabelle really gives her that.”
The Tudors, X-Men: First Class, Annabelle, The Mummy, Malignant, Silent Night, Mercy, Mutiny
Leo Driver is one of Joanne Miller’s teammates, a hotheaded agent intent on catching the Unabomber.
Bad Boys for Life, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, When the Game Stands Tall, Final Girl, Heart of Champions, Race to Witch Mountain
Eddie Turrell is another FBI agent aiding the team in the search for Ted Kaczynski.
Homeland, Dutton Ranch, She’s Lost Control, Dexter: Resurrection, American Rust, Inside Amy Schumer
Dean Kaplan is the special agent in charge of the FBI’s UNABOM task force.
Better Call Saul, Westworld, Snowpiercer, Grand Theft Auto V, Emancipation, V/H/S/99, Revival
