Jacob Tremblay Goes Dark for ‘Unabomber’ and Faces Russell Crowe
Jacob Tremblay is in full bloom promo mode, selling his new film Unabomber and talking Russell Crowe, the weight of playing a young Ted Kaczynski, and what it was like stepping into one of the darkest real-life stories of the 20th century.
Dig out cutie patottie Jacob joining the 3rd Hour of NBC’s TODAY as he breaks down thee Netflix biographical drama, which arrives globally on September 25, 2026.
The factual setup matters here: Tremblay plays the 16-year-old Ted Kaczynski, while Russell Crowe plays Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, the professor whose controversial psychological experiments become a major part of the film’s account of Kaczynski’s younger years. Shailene Woodley co-stars as FBI agent Joanne Miller, who leads the later manhunt timeline.
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Jacob Tremblay takes on a very different kind of role.
Unabomber follows the teenage Ted Kaczynski years at Harvard before jumping forward to the FBI manhunt that made his name infamous.
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Directed by Janus Metz, Unabomber is built around two timelines. One follows young Ted arriving at Harvard as a prodigy; the other jumps decades forward into the hunt for the domestic terrorist he would become.
That split is exactly what gives Tremblay the trickier assignment. He is not playing the fully formed public figure audiences already know from headlines and documentaries. He is playing the younger version before that future has happened — brilliant, isolated, impressionable and still unaware of the name history will eventually give him.
Tremblay has said he was drawn to that contradiction, telling press that he enjoyed playing “a young Ted and an innocent take on this domestic terrorist.” That framing does not excuse what Kaczynski later did; it simply explains the film’s interest in the years before the violence, when the person and the infamy were not yet the same thing.
Crowe’s Henry Murray is positioned as one of the most important adult figures in that part of the story. Netflix describes Murray’s experiments as controversial, and the film uses that relationship to explore how authority, ambition and isolation intersect around the teenage Kaczynski.
For Tremblay, that means a lot of his most charged material is opposite Crowe, which is a very different acting lane from the one that first made him famous in Room and later Wonder. The boy actor is very much gone; this is the kind of performance built around restraint, discomfort and a character the audience already knows is heading somewhere terrible.
Images: NBC TODAY.
The cast around him is equally stacked. Along with Crowe and Woodley, the film includes Annabelle Wallis, Alexander Ludwig, Steven Ogg and Marc Menchaca, with Metz directing from a script by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves.
And because the movie is inspired by true events rather than presented as a documentary, the distinction matters: Unabomber is a dramatization of Kaczynski’s early life and the later investigation, not a literal transcript of history. Its focus is psychological and narrative — how a teenage prodigy, a powerful academic environment and decades of isolation are shaped into a story about the making of an infamous figure.
For Jacob, though, the promo stop is refreshingly simple: talk about the work, talk about Russell Crowe, and let people see that the kid from Room has moved into a much thornier chapter of his career.
Dig out cutie patottie Jacob below as he joins the 3rd Hour of TODAY and gets into Unabomber, playing young Ted Kaczynski and sharing the screen with Russell Crowe.
Jacob Tremblay Talks ‘Unabomber’ and Working With Russell Crowe on TODAY
Tremblay joins NBC’s 3rd Hour of TODAY ahead of the Netflix drama’s September 25 release.
Source: NBC TODAY; Netflix.
