Lilly Wachowski calls out right-wing groups for misreading The Matrix

Published: Dec 02, 2025, 11:47

Warner Bros.

Co-writer and co-director of The Matrix Lilly Wachowski has been clapping back at fascists who embrace her movie and misappropriate its message.

The Matrix is a sci-fi classic that we placed at Number 1 on our list of best movies ever.

Released in 1999, it’s a dystopian sci-fi movie about a hacker called Neo who learns that his world is a simulation designed by AI to pacify humans, and that in reality, we’re all hooked up to machines for the purpose of harvesting our bioelectric energy.

Neo makes that discovery when he’s offered a red pill and a blue pill, with red representing the truth, and blue returning him to the simulation. And Lilly Wachowski believes that choice has been wilfully misread and misrepresented.

Lilly Wachowski says right-wing “mutate” Matrix message

Speaking on the So True podcast, Wachowski said: “Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything. They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda, to obfuscate what the real message is. This is what fascism does.”

Wachowski continued: “This idea of… there is only two biological genders – they’re calling it science, but it is not science. And that is what fascism does. It takes these things, these ideas that are generally acknowledged as questions or investigations, or truisms about humanity and life, and they turn them to something else… they remove the weight of what those things represent.”

Wachowski – who came out as trans in 2016 – has previously said that red-pilling has nothing to do with conservative ideology, and that it serves as something of a trans allegory in the movie.

“That was the original intention, but the corporate world wasn’t ready for it,” Wachowski explained in 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, stating that The Matrix is “all about this desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view.”