June 24, 2024 – Interview with Michael Sheen

How did you first get involved in the series?

“I got involved in this project because I had a phone call from Dan and Lucy [Buried: The Last Witness presenters/producers Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor] out of the blue, asking me about my relationship with a man called Douglas Gowan. I think, seven years previous to this phone call, I had gone down a rabbit hole, as many people do, on the internet where I had discovered this extraordinary story about this man and what he had been investigating over the years, since the sixties. And I didn’t know what to do with what I’d found out. And then suddenly I had somewhere to go with it.”

And what was it about the story that particularly resonated with you?

“It’s a story that involves Wales. It’s a story that has a fantastic dramatic narrative to it. It’s a story that has conspiracies all around it. It’s a story that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s a story about how poor communities can be exploited. And about how people who don’t have a voice can be ignored, even when there are dangers. And it’s a story about danger that is still there now presently, and that something needs to be done about it.”

What was the most shocking thing that you discovered during this investigation?

“I think the most shocking thing that has been uncovered has been the scale of the problems, and the scale of the potential dangers to people. Not just about this particular aspect of it but what this is connected to – the idea of ‘forever chemicals’, the idea of toxic chemicals that don’t degrade. How prevalent and how much it is in our lives. It’s so overwhelming, once you start to discover the truth about this, that I can see why it makes people not do anything about it. Because it’s too much, it’s almost too much for our brain to take in. So that was the most shocking aspect of it for me.”

And what would you like people to get out of the series?

“The one thing I want people to take away from this is to say that this is going on and something needs to be done about it. Because there are people who are potentially in danger. A lot of people, a lot of communities. And someone needs to take responsibility for it and to do something about it. Please God, it’s not a problem, but let’s make sure that we’re proving this to be the case.”

Following their disturbing investigation into a toxic dump at Mobuoy Road in Northern Ireland, investigative journalists Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor return with an explosive new story, unearthing the abiding impact of ‘forever chemicals.

Buried: The Last Witness is the untold account of one of the world’s first-ever whistleblowers on ‘forever chemicals’. When the podcast hosts uncover a box of unseen evidence and affidavits from a dead witness, it sparks a journey into one of the UK’s darkest environmental secrets. In a surprise twist, they discover that the actor Michael Sheen recorded the witness’s final testimony.

Across 10 episodes, the intrepid trio follow the trail to some of the most toxic sites in the country – and the world – to uncover the horrifying legacy that PCB chemicals are having on the environment, our communities and even our food chain.