Actor Pays Down $1.3M of His Hometown's Debt

A Welsh actor has forked over six figures of his own cash to pay down the debt for hundreds of people from his hometown. Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway, a documentary designed to educate the masses on credit debt, debuted on Monday on the UK's Channel 4, and in it, the Tron: Legacy actor notes he donated $130,000 out of his own wallet to help pay off $1.3 million in debt owed by 900 people in Port Talbot, Wales, per Business Insider.

The Guardian dives further into Sheen's "Robin Hood act," which the hourlong documentary fleshes out via the stories of ordinary people struggling financially. "There's a lot of myths out there," Sheen says, per the BBC. "I've heard over the years people saying, 'Well, these are feckless people who are making terrible choices and living extravagantly outside their means.'" He says that's not what's going on, calling those affected "incredibly hard-working" people "who are doing their absolute best."

The documentary, which includes interviews with some of those folks, "digs into loan sharks and unofficial lenders, uncovering stories of violence and intimidation, of missed payments leading to interest doubling and doubling again," per the Guardian, which cites the example of one man who started out owing about $650 and ended up with a final interest-inflated tab of just over $7,100. The movie explains that Sheen was able to pay down a huge chunk of Port Talbot residents' debt bills by setting up a debt acquisition company, which is permitted by law to scoop up bundles of debt for pennies on the dollar.

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Among the debt that Sheen helped clear: credit card debt, personal loans, and overdraft debt, per the BBC. "I am genuinely not sure I can afford to do this, but I'm still going to do it, because I've made a commitment and because I know this problem isn't going to go away," he says in the film. Sheen realizes that some may accuse him of doing this as a publicity stunt, but he's pushing back on that. "I'm not doing it because I want people to think I'm great," he says. "I want us to be able to imagine an alternative to this, because this doesn't work." More from him here. (More debt stories.)