Michael Sheen spent his own money to write off $1.86 million of neighbours’ debts

Michael Sheen bought and wrote off the debts of people living in his hometown. (Dominik Bindl/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Actor Michael Sheen has bought £1 million (C$1.86 million) of his neighbours’ debts and written them off using £100,000 (C$186,000) of his own money.

Sheen, best known for his roles in “The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Masters of Sex” and “Good Omens,” first embarked on his “debt heist” two years ago, with the twin aims of helping 900 people in his native South Wales and spotlighting the perils of a debt industry that demands sky-high interest rates on short-term loans.

His efforts will be detailed in a documentary titled “Michael Sheen’s One Million Pound Giveaway,” to be broadcast on British TV station Channel 4 later Monday. In the documentary, he explains the complex financial structures of the debt industry that allowed him to buy debt worth 10 times the value of his own money.

“People’s debts get put into bundles and then debt-buying companies can buy those bundles and then they can sell it on to another debt-buying company at a lower price so … the people who own the debt can sell it for less and less money,” he explained in an interview on BBC TV’s “The One Show” last week.

“I was able to set up a company and for £100,000 of my own money, buy £1 million of debt because it had come down in value like that.”

Sheen added that he doesn’t know the identities of those people whose debts he paid off, only that they live in the region around Port Talbot, his hometown and an area whose economy has been decimated by the gradual decline of its steelmaking industry.

“It couldn’t be more real, like, how much people are hurting,” he says in a clip from the documentary that shows him sitting in a cafe in Port Talbot and describing how waitresses told him that steelworkers came in, sat at their tables and cried, mourning the loss of their livelihood.

Sheen has long called for tighter regulation of the credit system in the U.K., founding pressure group the End High Cost Credit Alliance in 2017.

And as part of his wider campaign around the documentary, Sheen is lobbying the British government to pass a Fair Banking Act that would increase fair lending from financial services to people on low incomes, reducing their reliance on payday loan companies and loan sharks.

By Issy Ronald, CNN