Bad Genius - Characters & Cast

Initially, her motivation is friendship, then shifts to financial need and a sense of justice against a corrupt system that exploits her and her father. As the schemes grow, her motivation becomes entangled with pride in her own intellectual superiority and the thrill of outsmarting the system.

Lynn begins as a brilliant, slightly naive student who believes in academic merit. Her arc is one of disillusionment and moral compromise. After discovering the hypocrisy of the school administration, she rationalizes her cheating business as a way to level the playing field and secure her own financial future. The international STIC heist pushes her to her mental and ethical limits. Ultimately, overwhelmed by guilt and the consequences of her actions—particularly the corruption of Bank—she rejects the criminal path, confesses, and chooses to reclaim her integrity, even at a great personal cost.

His primary motivation is to support his mother and use his intellect to achieve a better life through legitimate means (the scholarship). After this path is destroyed, his motivation becomes revenge and financial gain, seeing cheating as the only viable path left.

Bank is introduced as Lynn's moral and intellectual rival. He is rigorously honest, despises cheating, and believes solely in hard work to escape his poverty. His arc is a tragic fall from grace. After Pat has him beaten and he loses his scholarship opportunity, his worldview shatters. Desperate and cynical, he agrees to join Lynn's scheme, but unlike her, he embraces the criminality completely. By the end, he is the one who wants to continue and expand the business, having been fully corrupted by the money and power he tasted. His journey shows that even the most steadfast morals can be broken by systemic injustice and desperation.

His motivation is purely transactional and self-serving: to get the grades he needs to get into a good university without putting in any effort, using his wealth to manipulate others to achieve his goals.

Pat is a wealthy, charismatic, and amoral student who views money as the solution to every problem. He has no significant developmental arc; he begins and ends as an entitled opportunist. He is the one who commercializes Lynn's talent, turning her small acts of cheating into a large-scale business. His casual cruelty is revealed when he arranges for Bank to be beaten up simply to force him into their scheme. He represents the unapologetic corruption of the upper class, never facing true consequences for his actions.

Her primary motivation is to please her parents and maintain her social standing and extracurricular passions (like the school play) by achieving grades she is incapable of earning on her own. She relies on Lynn to solve her problems.

Grace is the catalyst for the entire plot. She is kind-hearted and friendly but lacks academic ability. Her character arc is minimal. While she feels some guilt over the escalating situation, she is largely a passive participant, swept along by Pat's ambition and her reliance on Lynn. She represents the well-meaning but weak-willed individual who enables corruption through her passivity and desire for an easy way out. Her need to maintain a certain GPA for her extracurricular activities is the initial spark for Lynn's cheating.