Jacob Tremblay to play teen Ted Kaczynski in Netflix’s Unabomber

Netflix has released the first images and a September premiere date for Unabomber, casting Jacob Tremblay as a young Ted Kaczynski alongside Russell Crowe and Shailene Woodley in a true-crime drama spanning two timelines.

TL;DR

• Netflix confirms Unabomber premieres Friday, September 25, 2026
• Jacob Tremblay plays a teenage, Harvard-era Ted Kaczynski
• Russell Crowe plays Professor Henry Murray; Shailene Woodley plays FBI Agent Joanne Miller
• Directed by Janus Metz, from a script by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves

The cast and the premiere date

Netflix confirmed that Unabomber will land on the service on Friday, September 25, with Tremblay leading the cast as the college-age version of Kaczynski. The streamer paired the announcement with a batch of first-look images shared through a Netflix press release reported by UPI.

The official synopsis, according to Netflix’s Tudum, describes Kaczynski’s shift “from 16-year-old Harvard prodigy into the infamous Unabomber,” with his past resurfacing decades later once an FBI manhunt catches up with him.

Two timelines, one manhunt

The film crosscuts between Kaczynski’s teenage years at Harvard, where he’s drawn into psychological experiments run by Professor Henry Murray, and the 1990s hunt for the real-life bomber. Crowe plays Murray, while Woodley plays Joanne Miller, a fictionalized FBI agent who tracks Kaczynski using his own manifesto, according to an exclusive first look from USA Today.

Annabelle Wallis rounds out the lead cast as Christiana Morgan, Murray’s associate in the experiments, according to a report from What’s on Netflix.

Tremblay prepared by studying Kaczynski’s own voice

Speaking to USA Today, Tremblay said he leaned into playing a version of Kaczynski who has no idea what he’ll become. To get the cadence right, the actor studied recordings of the adult Kaczynski being interviewed by investigators, a process he called fascinating given how “confident and cocky and arrogant” the real man came across, according to USA Today’s report.

Director Janus Metz, whose credits include Borg vs McEnroe, told Tudum that the FBI’s yearslong hunt for Kaczynski first drew him in, but it was the lesser-known Harvard chapter of his life that shaped the film’s structure.

UK viewers: how and when to watch

Unabomber streams globally the same day it lands on Netflix, meaning UK subscribers get access on September 25 alongside the US. Netflix’s UK Standard plan currently costs £12.99 a month, one of three UK tiers alongside Standard with Ads and Premium, according to Choose.co.uk’s 2026 pricing breakdown.

Background on the project

The film has been in development since 2020, when 2.0 Entertainment first hired Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves to write the script, according to Deadline’s original report on the deal.

Kaczynski, the real-life domestic terrorist behind a string of mail bombings between 1978 and 1995, died by suicide in prison in 2023 at age 81.

For more on what else is streaming this autumn, check out our coverage of War Machine 2, and see how Netflix handled another true-story biopic in our report on Michael B. Jordan’s The Greatest.

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Reported from publicly available interviews and verified press sources. Last reviewed 29 July 2026.