A man called Elek Eklund called actor Will Mellor an “absolute TRAITOR” on X after seeing Mellor in a Solmar Villas holiday advert alongside a mixed-race family, suggesting that mixed relationships were not “the norm” and that he personally “would have refused to help.” There was one problem with this analysis. The family in the advert was Will Mellor’s actual family. He has been married to his wife Michelle for almost 20 years. Eklund’s profile was deleted before midnight.
Mellor, best known for Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Broadchurch and Line of Duty – and most recently to Coventry fans as a man who genuinely cares about this city’s football club – serves as a brand ambassador for Solmar Villas. The advert shows him on holiday with his family. It was an advert. With his family. In it.
When Eklund posted his accusation of treason at 9.30pm, the original post received 275,000 views within hours. Mellor saw it and asked simply: “Why am I a traitor?!?!”
This was, as it turned out, the most consequential question asked on British social media on Tuesday evening.
What Eklund said – and why it matters to name it
Eklund’s explanation of Mellor’s supposed betrayal is worth quoting in full because vagueness about what was actually said would do the story a disservice.
“I’ll give you a clue Will. British TV likes to give out the idea that mixed relationships are the norm. They’re not. They exist of course yes but the norm though? No. You fell into it though. Personally, I would have refused to help.”
This is not a comment about an advert. It is a statement of a specific ideological position: that mixed-race relationships are abnormal, that depicting them in media constitutes a form of propaganda, and that a white British man who appears alongside a mixed-race family in any context is a traitor to an undefined but clearly racial conception of Britain.
The language of “refusing to help” reveals exactly what Eklund thought Mellor was doing: lending his face to a campaign for the normalisation of something Eklund considers abnormal. He was not commenting on the quality of the holiday deals. He was expressing a view about what British families should look like – and what actors should refuse to represent.
It is worth naming this for what it is because the specific response Mellor gave makes most sense when you understand what he was responding to.
The response
“It’s my fuckin wife and children in the Advert!!!?!?? What are you talking about!???”
Seven words into Will Mellor’s reply, the entire architecture of Eklund’s complaint collapsed. He had not encountered an actor hired to represent a mixed-race family for a brand campaign. He had told a husband and father that his own wife and children were abnormal. That he personally would have refused to share a screen with them.
Mellor has been married to Michelle McSween since 2011. They have two children. They have been a family for the entirety of the social media age that enabled Eklund to tell them, in public, at 9.30pm on a Tuesday, that their existence as a family was not the norm and that appearing in an advert together represented a form of betrayal.
Eklund deleted his profile. This was the only sensible response available to him at that point, and also the last honest thing he did.
The internet’s response
The reactions that followed Mellor’s reply formed a rapid and genuinely heartwarming sequence.
@Suriyah: “Racists just finding out today that Will Mellor has been married to a black woman for almost 20 years 😂😂😂😂😂”
@suzyallthatglitters posted a photograph of Mellor with his family and wrote simply: “Best wishes to you Will & your beautiful family 😍” – the post received 724 likes within hours.
Ralph Ineson – The Witcher, Game of Thrones, a man whose voice is itself a national institution – replied to Mellor with: “Love you Will 🤜”
@AndrewMcB: “Elek deletes his profile by midnight. What a tit.” He was right. The profile was gone.
@jramage84: “Thats folded me up 😂 the silly bastard.”
@scousepie: “Elek’s had a fucking mare here.”
@woodeiro: “This is fucking wild, what a tit. This platform has really fried some peoples brains.”
And @sdoddsy, with the observation that landed the hardest: “Sometimes hard to believe it’s 2026. Feels like we’re going backwards – and we all know why.”
What it says about where we are
The Eklund incident is funny in the specific, immediate way that watching someone walk confidently into a glass door is funny. The man accused a husband and father of betraying Britain by appearing in a holiday advert with his own wife and two children. The punchline wrote itself without any help.
But @sdoddsy’s response deserves to sit alongside the jokes rather than beneath them. “Sometimes hard to believe it’s 2026. Feels like we’re going backwards – and we all know why.”
The original post received 275,000 views. That is not a man shouting in an empty room. That is a man stating, in a public forum, a view about mixed-race families that was received and passed on a quarter of a million times before he decided to disappear. The people who retweeted it without challenge were making a choice. The platform that hosted it without action was making a choice.
As we reported in our coverage of Led By Donkeys at the Tommy Robinson march, the most visible counter to this kind of politics tends to arrive not through argument but through the specific exposure of how hollow it is. Eklund made an argument about what British families should look like. He made it to a man whose family refuted the argument simply by existing and appearing on a screen together.
Will Mellor didn’t need to make a speech. He just told the truth about whose family it was. That was enough. It usually is.
