The actor grew up poor, got rich, then lost everything backing the 2019 Homeless World Cup. Now he’s giving away more of his money to help 900 total strangers. Doesn’t he think he’s done enough?

Michael Sheen walks into a post office in Port Talbot and asks to withdraw £100,000. “That would be nice,” says the young woman behind the till. Then it dawns on her that he’s not joking. “Can I do £100,000?” she asks her colleague. She cannot.

“I loved that so much. She was really funny,” says Sheen. Filmed for a new Channel 4 documentary, Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway, this was part of the actor’s two-year project to use £100,000 of his own money to buy £1m worth of debt, owed by about 900 people in south Wales – and immediately cancel it.

He doesn’t know who they are (data protection stopped that), but he hopes that the programme will alert those who hadn’t realised their debts had been cancelled (the people who might have been ignoring the scary letters that come through the door), as well as shine a light into the dark corners of high-cost credit, and what happens when debts are sold on to collectors.

It feels more timely than ever, in a cost of living crisis where 20 million people are financially vulnerable – but this is an area Sheen, 56, has been working on since 2018, when he set up the End High Cost Credit Alliance. He became interested when he was still living in Los Angeles in 2016, and watched John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight show spend about $60,000 to buy up $15m worth of medical debt and wipe it. Wondering if he could do something similar, he found it was harder in the UK, but by then he was hooked – appalled at the way the poorest people were forced to use high-interest credit that had become impossible to pay off. Or, worse, were turning to loan sharks.

Read the full interview by Emine Saner here: ‘It’s not because I want people to think I’m great’: Michael Sheen on paying off £1m of his neighbours’ debts | Michael Sheen | The Guardian