On March 10, local time, a documentary titled "Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway" was broadcast on British Channel 4. The slightly lengthy title actually revealed most of the story the film was going to tell.
The 56-year-old Welsh actor Michael Sheen is well-known to the audience for his roles in the movies "The Queen" and "Nixon" and the TV series "Masters of Sex" and "Good Omens". In addition to filming, he is also a well-known philanthropist in the British film industry. He has been donating money and participating in various charity activities for more than ten years. In 2021, he announced that he would be a "non-profit actor" in the future, and all his performance income would be donated to charity organizations, without keeping a penny for himself. This time, he paid 100,000 pounds out of his own pocket to buy out the 1 million pounds debt owed by about 900 poor people in his hometown of South Wales, and then wrote it off.
Michael Sheen in Good Omens
Back to the end of last year, local Welsh media reported that Michael Sheen spent his own money to help hundreds of debtors in South Wales pay off their debts. As for the source of the news, it was not actually from Sheen's own boasting, but his fans found that on the local community's Facebook group, a TV production company posted a message saying, "Actor Michael Sheen has been campaigning for a fairer credit system for many years. He used his own money to relieve hundreds of people in South Wales of their personal debts, which is an extraordinary move. If you receive a letter from a credit company called Ten Acquisitions, this is good news that Mike has paid off your part of the debt, and he is looking forward to hearing from you. Details on how to get in touch with him are in the letter."
Suspecting that someone was using his name to commit fraud, a fan directly @ed him on social media, asking if the post was true. He then publicly confirmed the matter and stated that he was working with a TV production company to shoot a documentary, so he also hoped to contact those who were trapped in loan sharking to tell their stories and remind the government and the whole society to pay attention to the credit debt crisis of the British people.
Michael Sheen paid £100,000 of his own money to buy out a poor man's £1 million debt.
In this documentary, which took two years to complete, Michael Sheen returned to Port Talbot, Wales, where he was born, to visit ordinary workers struggling on the poverty line, and to understand that after they had spent all their savings, they had to resort to loan sharks to survive and eventually fell into spiral debts and could no longer repay their loans. He also compared the astonishing profits earned by British banks and other financial institutions, and was indignant about these unfair systems. He read out a series of statistics, including that by the end of 2024, a total of 2.2 million low-income families in the UK still owed high-interest loans. He also conducted an in-depth investigation of loan sharks and exposed various violent debt collection conspiracies.
He said that he was initially inspired by the American host John Oliver, who spent about $60,000 to buy $15 million worth of medical debt and write it off in one of his talk show "Last Week Tonight" in 2016. Sheen was very interested in this and came up with the idea of doing the same in the UK.
"It is very important to spend real money to do this," he said in an interview with The Guardian, "because this will make everyone believe that I am serious about doing this, and it will also encourage more people, more capable people to do the same as me. As for the documentary, I also heard that the guy actually had selfish motives and wanted to leave his name behind for doing good deeds. I knew there would be such speculations, but only by doing this can the public pay attention to this matter. Anyway, I have never thought about gaining anything for myself, and I don’t do this for others to think I am great. I just hope that the whole society can mobilize and think of ways to change the current unfair situation."
This is not the first time that Michael Sheen has invested heavily in charity. Back in 2019, he helped organize the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, but the required £2 million was not raised until the last minute. In the end, he sold his properties in Los Angeles and London to provide funds without asking for anything in return.
Michael Sheen once advanced £2 million to cover the funding gap for a charity football match.
