‘Good Omens’ Star Michael Sheen Spends His Own Cash To Write Off $1.3 Million In Debt Owed By 900 Residents In His Hometown

Alessio AtriaMarch 13, 2025, 3:08 pmNews >

British actor Michael Sheen spent £100,000 ($129,000) to write off £1 million ($1.3 million) of his neighbor’s debts.

Sheen wrote off debt to help more than 900 people in south Wales, where he had grown up. This was part of a two-year project to emphasize issues with the current credit system, which was filmed for an upcoming Channel 4 documentary, Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway.

Even though the Good Omens star does not know the names of the people he helped due to data protection, he hopes the documentary will reveal the dark corners of high-cost credit and show what occurs when debts are sold to collectors.

Sheen has been focusing on the cost-of-living crisis, which has left 20 million people financially vulnerable, since 2018, when he set up the End High-Cost Credit Alliance.

He became intrigued when, in 2016, he was still living in Los Angeles and watched John Oliver‘s Last Week Tonight show spend almost $60,000 to buy up $15 million worth of medical debt and wipe it off the books.

Sheen wondered if he could do something similar. He believed it was more challenging in the United Kingdom and was shocked that the poorest people were forced to use high-interest credit, making the debt impossible to pay off. Some even had to turn to loan sharks.

“I think it’s like everything that I respond to,” he told The Guardian. “It’s that there’s just a basic unfairness.”

In 2021, Sheen, the lead actor in Showtime’s Masters of Sex, called himself a not-for-profit actor, indicating that he had a responsibility to put as much of his earnings as he could toward causes and projects he believes in. Much of that focuses on his local community, Port Talbot, where the steelworks’ remaining blast furnaces recently shut. In South Wales, 30% of children are living in poverty.

In one scene of his upcoming documentary, Sheen speaks to a woman in a cafe who tells him locals were crying at tables after a blast furnace was closed.

“We’re sitting in a cafe at the moment, with steelworks right behind us, and the ladies who work here, before we started filming, told me that tomorrow is the last ship, the last boat coming into the dock here to deliver stuff to the steelworks,” the actor said.

“And they’ve described people sitting in here just crying at these tables,” he added. “So it couldn’t be more real how much people are hurting. It’s made me realize that this is … you’ve got to give it a chance, you’ve got to give it a go, and maybe this program will make a tiny difference, or maybe it won’t, but I can’t walk away from it now.”