When Michael Sheen, the Welsh actor, walked into a post office in Port Talbot and asked to withdraw £100, 000 the young lady behind the till said, “That would be nice!” She thought he was joking! But Michael was filming a new Channel 4 documentary about his “Secret Million Pound Giveaway.” This is a 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 then immediately cancel it. Michael doesn’t know who the people are but hopes the programme will shine a light into the dark corners of high-cost credit and what happens when debts are sold to debt collecting agencies.

In 2016, when Michael was living in Los Angeles, he became aware that $15m worth of medical debt could be wiped out for just $60,000. He was appalled by the unfairness that means the poorest people are forced to use high-interest credit that is impossible to pay off and so turn to loan sharks. In 2018 he set up the “End High Cost Credit Alliance” and in 2021 declared himself a not-for-profit actor. Much of what he does centres around Port Talbot, his local community, where the last of the steelworks’ blast furnaces recently shut, and people are struggling. In south Wales, 30% of children live in poverty.

Michael traces his change in focus to when he staged in his hometown of Port Talbot his version of The Passion, a three-day epic about the life and death of Jesus. As he worked on this production, he met the 1000 local people who took part and many community organisations. He says, “I was learning about what was going on that I was totally unaware of, growing up, and partly because you sort of didn’t want to know”. It was painful to learn, for instance, about the town’s young carers – children who were looking after ill or disabled parents with very little support. For many of these families money is very short, and it made Michael ask, “Why is that?’”

Jesus had and has a special concern for those who are poor. At the beginning of his ministry, he went to the synagogue in Nazareth, his hometown, and read from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.” At great personal cost Jesus paid the debt of our sins by dying on the Cross. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”