Michael Sheen has opened up about the shock discovery he made about his own health while filming a documentary on buried chemical waste.
The documentary Buried
The Welsh actor has recently been working on Buried, a BBC documentary arriving on Monday in which the star of stage and screen visits parts of Wales and the north-west of England where dangerous chemicals were dumped in the 1970s.
The chemicals, called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were banned in the 1980s after it was found that they damaged human DNA and were linked to cancer. Canada banned PCBs in 1977, and the United States followed in 1979, yet contaminated sites on both sides of the border still require remediation today.
Personal test results
PCBs can stay in soil, water and human tissue for decades, with Sheen, 57, learning while working through the documentary that residents based near the former dumps had abnormally high PCB levels and had suffered rare cancers.
As part of the filming process, Sheen, who was born in Newport and raised in South Wales, agreed to have his own PCB levels tested so that he could act as a control for the documentary.
However, the tests showed that the Good Omens star also had PCBs, which are now considered to be "forever chemicals", in his own blood.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Sheen explained: "I wasn't quite expecting how shocked I'd be by that.
"I thought, 'Of course I'll be tested because you won't find anything', and then when you get the results, you realise there is no safe level, we all have it in us."
Sheen is now calling for official tests to be done at the many sites where chemical companies dumped "tens of thousands of tons" of PCBs in the Seventies.
In the documentary, Sheen found that soils in the areas contained nearly 2,000 times the expected amounts of the chemicals.
He told the publication: "People are dying of cancers, rare cancers, and there's illness, and it's incredibly worrying.
"I'm hoping that people will be so outraged and shocked by this story that there will be a demand for something to be done."
Sheen continued: "The places where the dumping took place share a pattern, a history of chronic illness that could potentially mask any problems and a desperate need for employment, so nobody feels they can speak out... Goodness knows how much of this is out there."