Michael Sheen narrates new climate change film

Actor Michael Sheen narrates a new film that aims to improve the way climate change is discussed in schools.

You Told Us To Talk About the Weather, launching nationwide today, was shot on a rewilded farm at the Westacre Estate near King’s Lynn in Norfolk.

It was written in collaboration with young farmers and it questions why discussions about the weather are so common, in contrast to discussions about climate change.

Environmental campaign group the Climate Majority Project hopes the five-minute film will help pupils and teachers speak “honestly and sensitively” about the issue.

It stars young Norfolk actor Hemi Grimsby, Ben Mansfield, who appeared in sci-fi drama Primeval, and Florence Wright, who was in the film The Flash.

It was written by King’s Lynn-born playwright Emma-Louise Howell, who spent time speaking to young farmers in the county about their experience of climate change.

She said: “They really were engaged in it and they were almost shouting into a void saying ‘we have got a bit of an answer, working with nature’.

“You can’t control the weather, but they are having to adjust every single day to the shift in climate.

“It’s not conceptual to them.”

Howell said working with Sheen, whose screen appearances include Good Omens and The Twilight Saga, had been a dream come true.

“It was very surreal for me as a writer to hear the person you always imagined narrating it, reading it – speaking those words and speaking them with such incredible delivery.

“It was a really, really special moment.”

The director, Harry Tomlin, said the Westacre Estate was the ideal place to set the story.

“We wanted to tell it through the eyes of a child, set against the rural Norfolk landscape and in a gritty folk-horror genre.

“This film provides an accessible way for audiences to engage with climate education and begin the conversation, without feeling like they are being pushed or patronised.”