Netflix released the Unabomber trailer, putting Jacob Tremblay front and center as Ted Kaczynski ahead of the film’s Sept. 25 premiere. The preview gives the first broad look at a project built around Kaczynski’s origin story and eventual capture, with Russell Crowe and Shailene Woodley in the cast.
Tremblay’s performance is built around a young man who says, “Sometimes I feel like I don't belong here. I think there's something wrong with me,” and the actor said, “I wanted him to feel real.” That line matters because the film is not presenting Kaczynski as a single-note villain; it is showing the early isolation before the violence that made him known as the Unabomber after mail bombings that stretched for nearly two decades.
1958 and 1994
The trailer starts in 1994 with Joanne Miller searching for the Unabomber, then moves back to 1958, when Kaczynski was in college and first met Henry Murray. Murray tells the student, “You are the perfect candidate,” and later, “There's something special about you. You are different. You're ambitious, just like us.”
That setup is the film’s engine: the story crosscuts between the making of the Unabomber and the capture of the Unabomber. Janus Metz Pedersen said in July that it “is a story about a young man who feels increasingly disenfranchised by society and decides to take up violence as a means of revenge,” and that “We crosscut between two timelines, roughly speaking: the making of the Unabomber and the capture of the Unabomber.”
Russell Crowe and Shailene Woodley
Crowe plays Henry Murray, while Woodley plays federal agent Joanne Miller. Annabelle Wallis, Alexander Ludwig, Steven Ogg and Marc Menchaca also star, with Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves writing the script and also executive producing; Sophie Cassidy is a producer. Those credits make the trailer more than a casting tease — they show Netflix has assembled the full framework for a historical thriller built around both the origin and the manhunt.
Sept. 25 is the date that matters now. Anyone deciding whether to watch can already tell the film is aiming to balance psychological pressure with the crimes themselves, and the trailer’s two timelines suggest the release will answer how far the film goes into Kaczynski’s life beyond that split between college and capture.
