Game of Thrones fans know him as Grey Worm, the stolid and capable leader of Daenerys Targaryen’s Unsullied army, but pretty much since the start, actor Jacob Anderson’s primary interest has been music. “I would write songs and say , ‘Sing it like this!’ and she wouldn’t,” he explained to TIME. “I’d get really frustrated, really controlling about it. So at one point she just said, ‘Do it yourself.’ No one ever told me I had a good voice or anything; no one ever told me I could sing. They just let me get on with it.”
Years later, and Anderson — who goes by the stage name Raleigh Ritchie — has one album out with another on the way. And he’s not half-bad, either:
But most people still know him as Grey Worm, at least for the moment. While Anderson doesn’t have trouble balancing music with acting, he did have mixed feelings about wrapping shooting on the final season of Game of Thrones:
"And now I’ve got all the time in the world! It does feel weird. I think I’d managed to tell myself for a few years that I love doing that show, it’s great, but ultimately I’ve got lots of stuff to do. And then it ended and I was like, ‘I’m going to miss you all so much!’ I got really swept up."
But at least the cast and crew are keeping in tight in the meantime.
"David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], who are the showrunners, came to my show in L.A. last year, which was really nice. They didn’t tell me they were coming! I ran around the crowd high-fiving and I saw them, and was like, ‘What?!’ I think maybe because it’s the last year, more people have come up to me and been like, ‘By the way, I like what you’re doing.’"
I’ve gotta give some credit to TIME for trying to use music to wheedle information about the final season of Game of Thrones out of Anderson, as when it asks what kind of album he would make if he had to write one for season 8. “It would be basically a really secret album, where there was no details about anything to do with it.” Well played on both parts.
You can listen to Anderson’s newest single, “Time in a Tree,” below:
One final tidbit: if Anderson could have one of his Game of Thrones costars on a song as a featured artist, who would it be? “I feel like I would like to get a skit from Rory McCann, who plays the Hound. I’d get a skit of just Rory swearing. ” I’d listen.
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