Thom Merrilin actor talks about his song on The Wheel of Time

Thom Merrilin is a character well known to fans of The Wheel of Time, a gleeman (traveling performer) who joins our cast of heroes on their journey and has more to him than meets the eye. Book readers will know that Thom has a long and twisty history, and while we haven’t seen quite as much of him in the show, he still made an impression. Actor Alexandre Willaume embodied the character and gave a grittier, more world-weary take on Thom that fit the slightly darker tone of the TV adaptation really well.

And of course, if we’re talking Thom, there’s one scene that really stands out. Unlike in the books, which lumped Thom in with all the other characters introduced during the Winternight event in the Two Rivers, the show gave Thom his own moment to shine with a dedicated introduction. When Rand and Mat are traveling through a small mining town after fleeing Shadar Logoth, they stumble upon an inn where the gleeman is performing. Thom takes to the stage, and performs a song called “The Man Who Can’t Forget.”

Alexandre Willaume hasn’t forgotten “The Man Who Can’t Forget”

In a recent interview with the BingetownTV YouTube channel, Willaume discussed what the experience of filming the song was like. It turns out that Willaume is a true renaissance man, and long before he was on The Wheel of Time he was a musician playing in bands, as well as a painter, stand-up comic, and an assortment of other things. Really, those eclectic tastes just make him a better fit for a gleeman than we even realized.

“At first I was…worrying about it, because one thing is making your own music with friends and musicians, but this was written for the character,” Willaume remembered. “And so I was kind of…what is this gonna be, and what do they expect?

"I went into the studio, and I almost had a tear in my eye, because it was like…’I f***ing missed this so much. And then they presented this song to me that was really, really haunting. And I chose to do it in that kind of Tom Waits kind of way. But that was also me…taking it away from maybe the expectation of what he was, trying to do something else. And maybe another song you can do a totally different thing."

As we all heard on The Wheel of Time, Willaume’s take on Thom’s singing voice definitely took things in an unexpected direction. It gave the character a grounded feel that might have gotten lost if the show had hired someone with a less gravely voice. Considering Thom’s past that feels really fitting. “I wanted him to be more gritty…have a different kind of sexiness, or whatever. And not be that no flaws kind of ‘hey how you doing,’ you know?” Willaume joked, snapping his fingers.

Though he recorded a version of “The Man Who Can’t Forget” in the studio, the production ended up using a different take of Willaume performing it for the final cut. “They ended up using actually a live version, which I was so surprised about. So what’s in the series now is just…live, me singing it there. But we did it in the studio. I don’t know why they chose it that way. So I can hear the flaws as well, and I’m very picky.”

Personally I’m all for the live take, but of course live performances are rarely quite as polished as the full studio production, so it’s understandable that Willaume might have been a little leery when he first heard it on the show. “I saw it two times, and the second time I said, ‘yeah, that’s kind of cool.’ But the first time I was like, ‘oof,'” he said, laughing.

Season 1 of The Wheel of Time is available now on Prime Video. Season 2 is currently in production.

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