“They appropriate left-wing points of view and they mutate them for their own propaganda"
By Poppy Burton 30th November 2025
Credit: Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy.
Lilly Wachowski has addressed the “crazy, mutant” misinterpretations of The Matrix by right-wing groups, saying she’s ultimately unbothered by wilful misreadings of the film.
- READ MORE: ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ review: a nostalgia-heavy red pill of a blockbuster
Last year, it was announced that Wachowski, best known for collaborating with her sister Lana on The Matrix franchise, was set to direct Trash Mountain, starring comedian Caleb Hearon.
AdvertisementWith the feature currently in production in Chicago, Wachowski recently sat down with Hearon on his podcast and was asked about her feelings on right-wing groups attaching their ideologies to the 1999 sci-fi film.
“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it,” Wachowski said (via Variety). “I look at all of the crazy, mutant theories around The Matrix films and the crazy ideologies that those films helped create, and I just go, ‘What are you doing? No! That’s wrong!’ But I have to let it go to some extent.
“You’re never gonna be able to make absolutely every person believe what you initially intended.”
Most famously, the “blue pill or red pill” scene is often associated with radicalisation into far-right ideologies. Within the film, Keanu Reeves’ Neo has to take the red pill in order to be freed from the Matrix. This, spun into the political context of being “red pilled” means someone who has “woken up” to supposedly secret societal truths.
RecommendedWachowski has previously explained that the “original intention” was to make a transgender allegory. That said, she told Hearon she was not surprised that the film chimed with conservatives, because “right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything.”
“They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own to obfuscate what the real message is,” she said. “This is what fascism does. And so, of course, that’s going to happen.”
The filmmaker, who co-wrote and co-directed the groundbreaking movie with her sister, Lana – who also came out as trans in the 2010s – previously said “the world wasn’t quite ready for” a trans narrative at the turn of the millennium.
“I’m glad that it has gotten out that that was the original intention,” Lily said in a new Netflix Film Club video commemorating the 21st anniversary of the first film’s release. “The world wasn’t quite ready for it. The corporate world wasn’t ready for it.”
AdvertisementShe added: “I love how meaningful those films are to trans people and the way that they come up to me say, ‘Those movies saved my life.’ Because when you talk about transformation, specifically in the world of science fiction, which is just about imagination and world-building and the idea of the seemingly impossible becoming possible, that’s why it speaks it to them so much. And I’m grateful I can be a part of throwing them a rope along their journey.”
