Michael Sheen leads Welsh UFO comedy to Edinburgh premiere

Michael Sheen is to star in "Out There", a Welsh comedy about a UFO sighting that will premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August.

The film follows Maz, a 16-year-old astronomy enthusiast played by Nerys Amber Stocks, who believes a mysterious sighting holds the key to her father's disappearance. She enlists her sceptical best friend, played by Tom Moya, and an eccentric ufologist portrayed by Sheen to uncover the truth. The cast is almost entirely Welsh, featuring established names like Aneurin Barnard and Iwan Rheon.

For the Welsh creative economy, the production underscores a deliberate shift toward decentralised filmmaking. Director Simon Ryninks shot the feature around Bridgend, Nelson and Porthcawl, specifically to keep the production close to where the cast and crew are based. Producers Tibo Travers of Sweetdoh Films and Katie Dolan of Bad Cat anchored the project firmly within the local industry infrastructure, though some filming also took place in Ceredigion.

Ryninks, making his debut feature, said the film "couldn't ever be set anywhere else" but Wales. He framed the project as a way to reconnect with the Ceredigion coast after his mother's death, aiming to write about grief "with humour and a lightness of touch".

Sheen's involvement is deeply tied to his own past. He has long maintained that his hometown of Port Talbot is "very UFO-y". Speaking on the Scarred For Life podcast in 2025, he recalled being told at age eight in 1977 that a neighbour saw "a UFO hovering over her back garden". At 12, he claimed to have seen "a phalanx of lights" emerge from behind a mountain and float over the sea.

Ryninks drew on 1970s UFO sightings in west Wales, citing a "particular openness in Welsh culture to mystery, magic and folklore". The production faced the typical challenge of unreliable Welsh weather during an October shoot, but Ryninks joked that an unseasonably dry spell meant "I can only assume we have the aliens and their advanced weather-control technology to thank for that."

Ryninks admitted he wrote the character of Shifty Gruff with Sheen in mind. "It was a total long shot, but, like a UFO believer, I held on to the possibility of making contact," he said.