Michael Sheen spent his own money to write off $1.3 million of neighbors’ debts

Actor Michael Sheen has bought $1.3 million of his neighbors’ debts and written them off using $129,000 of his own money.

Actor Michael Sheen has bought £1 million ($1.3 million) of his neighbors’ debts and written them off using £100,000 ($129,000) 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.