Michael Sheen’s CV reads like a how-to for going forward post pandemic. The charities and third sector organisations for whom he acts as patron, ambassador or vice-president together comprise a roadmap for concerted action.
Sheen advocates for the local, the environmental and the cooperative (as President of WCVA, ambassador for Keep Wales Tidy, Patron of Social Enterprise UK). He speaks up for children (NSPCC), youth (Scene & Heard, Into Film), veterans (Healing the Wounds), and those affected by domestic violence (The Relationships Centre) and drug and alcohol abuse (WGCADA). Perhaps most pertinently, as his memorable speech in Tredegar five years ago attests, Sheen has long been a champion of the NHS; he is President of Treat Trust Wales, a rehabilitation centre at Swansea’s Morriston Hospital, and since 2018 has served as ambassadorial vice president for the Royal Society for Public Health. Depending on the circles in which you move, it might be easy to forget that Michael Sheen is also an actor; in an exceptionally strong field, one of the best Wales has ever produced.
Sheen refers humbly to his immense efforts in the cause of social justice as ‘the things I have been focusing on over the last few years’. But the causes, charities and third sector organisations represented and supported by Sheen are not ‘just things I decided I would get involved with – it was from listening to people, and being in the community when I’m at home, and not just from people I don’t know, but also from my own family members.’
He takes the example of the End High Cost Credit Alliance, which he founded in 2017. ‘Exploitative business practices – rent to own, payday loans, doorstep lenders – are aimed at certain kinds of communities. You only have to walk down Bridgend High Street – or wherever.’ Explaining how 2019’s Homeless World Cup came about, he cites his work with End Youth Homelessness Cymru: ‘You start to see where you can help’. On women’s refuges, he quotes the figures: ‘4,000 spaces available and 19,000 referrals. When you hear about it, you can’t help but get involved.’
‘It’s not a coincidence, therefore, that if these are the things that are most urgent to be looked at, then during a crisis – any crisis, but particularly a health crisis – those are the things that come to the surface.’
Sheen is completely unsurprised by the social and economic fallout of the pandemic because his activism is not based on personal choice but on social reality. ‘This is what around me is saying,’ he says in response to a question about whether he feels vindicated. ‘It’s not a matter of being vindicated. It’s clear for all to see: this needs dealing with… there’s going to be a lot more people on Universal Credit coming out of [the pandemic], and it was a fucking disaster before.’
Sheen’s close attention to his surroundings make him a realist and a pragmatist. He freely admits a lack of easy answers, but a palpable sense of hope runs through all of his responses. He sees in the fallout of COVID-19 a moment akin to 1945. ‘The vision that came off the second world war, from people finding themselves shoulder to shoulder with people they wouldn’t normally… created a fertile ground for what happened politically and socially.’ Sheen hopes a similar levelling will happen again, although he is clear that ‘empty rhetoric of the kind we saw around the [December 2019] General Election’ will not be enough. ‘It needs a strong vision, not just money pumping into it.’
Sheen constantly returns to the word ‘appetite’, underscoring the idea that, like many, he can sense a shift in public attitudes. ‘Last year we saw that Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – and Elizabeth Warren – were too radical for most people. Now we’ll have to see how [the pandemic] will affect people’s appetite for radical solutions.’ He cites the creation of the NHS, the reinvention of the welfare state and the massive postwar investment in housing as examples of the kinds of interventions that are necessary once again.
I suggest that in response to the pandemic many politicians and pundits have been doubling down on their existing view of solutions. Sheen agrees. ‘People will continue to see things through the prism of their ideology, but what’s been made very clear to us is what we need to keep going day by day. Unless the bin men collect the bins, unless the nurses and doctors…’ He trails off, pauses, realises that listing the contributions of essential workers is an unavailing task.
‘The temptation will be for things to go back to how they were. But that will be difficult,’ he contends. ‘Once the curtain has been pulled back, it’s very difficult to unsee what we have seen.’ He anticipates a clamour for better pay for key workers, a desire to reorder society around ‘the people who we absolutely have to accept keep this thing going… it’s not the hedge fund managers!’
‘Even the Tories, prior to the [2019] General Election, realised that their road had run out. People are already at the end of what they can deal with – financially and politically – in terms of the cuts.’
Sheen sees the political landscape being ‘scrambled’ by the pandemic to an even greater extent than had happened though the Brexit debate. ‘It’s very complicated for Keir Starmer,’ he observes, in terms of where and how the new UK Labour leader is going to build a coalition. ‘And who knows? Maybe Boris Johnson will have a Road to Damascus moment now he’s had his life saved by the NHS!’
Although Sheen’s politics clearly come from a particular place – leftist and ‘indy-curious’ – perhaps the popularity of his political interventions with large sections of the Welsh public result from his being unaligned to a particular party.
Sheen identifies multiple problems with and for Welsh Labour, which by extension dogs Welsh Government and hampers the relative success of devolution. ‘The first is that they’re complacent because they haven’t been challenged,’ he says, before swiftly moving on to a detailed expounding of what he also sees as ‘stasis’.
He identifies in Westminster and Plaid Cymru the rock and hard place between which Welsh Labour’s political space is severely limited. ‘They want to blame Westminster, but they can’t blame them too much because they’d turn into Plaid. If the Welsh people begin to believe that Westminster’s the problem, they’ll say well why don’t we have independence, then?’
‘Let’s put it this way,’ he says: ‘there isn’t a strong incentive for Welsh Government to want the people of Wales to be really clear about how things work… there’s a kind of mist that hangs over everything.’
But despite this criticism of Welsh Government and Welsh Labour, Sheen stops well short of advocating for independence as silver bullet. ‘The Welsh independence movement tried to get me to come on board,’ he says, ‘and it’s not that I’m against it, but if I get involved in things I tend to get billed as the front man, and I’m not confident enough [in the idea of independence] to commit to that… I’m indy-curious, but it’s too risky. I haven’t seen a concrete plan.’
Pushed on party politics, Sheen would like to see a situation following next year’s Senedd elections where the maths mean Welsh Labour are forced into some kind of arrangement with Plaid Cymru. ‘I’m not saying it would work,’ he says, ‘but I would like to see that.’
But for all Sheen’s careful equivocation and nuanced political views, his ‘answer’ to the great many problems afflicting the country is disarmingly simple. ‘Find out what’s happening, what people are doing, and build your system around that.’
And as he explains his activist principles and methodology, Sheen suddenly stumbles across a series of phrases that would make him sound dangerously like a politician if only we didn’t know better. ‘Look for it. Listen to them. Support it better.’
His involvement with philanthropic organisations has provided him with the understanding that: ‘it’s very hard not to get the impression that there’s a whole ecosystem designed not to solve the problem. Everyone unconsciously understands that if any of these things were solved, then [they] wouldn’t have jobs.’
Sheen cites Hilary Cottam’s book Radical Help, which posits the idea that ‘people are just being managed’, rather than having problems solved. He works, in New York, with Roseanne Haggerty, who also subscribes to the idea – specifically in the context of homelessness – that ‘certain things are kept going’ to aid the support structure rather than those who become clients to it.
He is very keen to stress, however, that he does not blame charities, or philanthropists, or the third sector for these failings. For Sheen this imperfect ecosystem exists because of the failure of the state. ‘The responsibility is with whatever government has not provided a safety net for people that actually works. We need to help people to solve their own problems rather than just manage their crisis.’
‘Let’s reimagine these institutions,’ he says of welfare and the NHS. ‘Let’s love it a bit more is not going to work.’
I ask if he’s in favour of Universal Basic Income, and again Sheen is equivocal. ‘You have to go to the evidence,’ he says. He makes a comparison with microfinance initiatives in the global south, saying that sometimes the answer is simply ‘just give people money’ – but that he also sees the counterargument, particularly around the dignity of work.
Sheen’s experience as an activist has convinced him that ‘any meaningful, sustainable change has to come from the bottom up. I get very nervous, and angry, when decisions are made by people who are unconnected from the ground. My hope comes from what people are actually doing.’
He emphasises the importance of community, and identifies ‘concrete things going on’ in response to the coronavirus outbreak. ‘Aberavon Rugby Football Club are joining up with Age Concern to deliver meals and prescriptions – that’s community. Even the setting up of WhatsApp groups amongst families; there’s a different sense of what we need.’
In Wales, Sheen agrees that a huge missing piece of the picture is our weak media, the subject of his own wide ranging Raymond Williams lecture (2017). He is not surprised that viewing figures for Wales-based news and information sources have hugely increased during the pandemic: ‘There’s nothing that focuses the mind like your own chances of survival.’
He cites Dr Rachel Howells’ research into the emergence of the ‘democratic deficit’ – the gap in public understanding of which level of government is responsible for what – and the idea that the rot began not with the closure of local papers, but when they lost reporters based in the locality. ‘In the case of the Port Talbot Magnet, it was when the news started being written by people sitting in Bristol or Swansea.’
But as with many of the most crucial issues facing us, Sheen also agrees that there are no easy answers to how we can create what Wales as a nation so clearly needs: ‘a shared space – for us to talk about what matters to us.’
‘On one hand, I’m going can I pay for something? But as much as I feel like my intentions are the best, the extreme version of that is Jeff Bezos running the Washington Post.’
As his baby daughter begins to whimper in the background, and our Zoom call draws to a close, I reflect on this strange new normal in which Sheen and I – and all of us – find ourselves. It’s a far cry from the last time we crossed paths in person, during National Theatre Wales’ Passion of Port Talbot in 2011, in which Sheen played a Christ-figure sent to redeem our contemporary world.
Clearly the real life Michael Sheen is neither prophet nor saviour, and it is abundantly clear that he doesn’t claim to be. But of the years since that memorable weekend nine years ago, some things are worth stating: here is a Hollywood actor who has stayed true to his roots, who has worked tirelessly to improve the lives of others in his community and our nation, and who – while he may not have all of the solutions – certainly seems to be pointing in the right direction.
SIDEBAR
CURRENT READING
John Jenkins: The Reluctant Revolutionary?
Wyn Thomas
Jack Scarriot’s Prize Fighters: Memoirs of a Welsh Boxing Booth Showman
Lawrence Davies
‘My reading tends to be for projects. I’ve set up a production company so that here in Wales we can begin to tell our own stories.’
CURRENT LISTENING
Radio
Podcasts
CURRENT WATCHING
Quiz
‘That was quite something. Event TV in the age of social media.’
Ozark
‘With the baby, we only get about an hour, or an hour and a half maximum, to watch something in the evenings.’
PULL QUOTES
There’s going to be a lot more people on Universal Credit coming out of [the pandemic], and it was a f***ing disaster before
Last year we saw that Corbyn and Bernie Sanders… were too radical for most people. Now we’ll have to see how [the pandemic] will affect people’s appetite for radical solutions.
Who knows? Maybe Boris Johnson will have a Road to Damascus moment now he’s had his life saved by the NHS!
there isn’t a strong incentive for Welsh Government to want the people of Wales to be really clear about how things work… there’s a kind of mist that hangs over everything