Video Interview: Colin Donnell Talks About Tommy Merlyn’s Relationships & Flashbacks!

In another roundtable interview from this year’s Wondercon in Anaheim, California, we have some video of Colin Donnell (Tommy Merlyn) talking about how his character’s relationships have been changing. He also touches upon whether or not we’ll see him in the upcoming flashback episode (“The Undertaking”) and much more.

Here are some highlights:

On the changing relationship with Oliver now that Tommy knows his secret: “Obviously, we see a total shift in 16, right? All of the sudden, nothing’s the same anymore, and that really carries us through the end of the season. I keep saying ‘shift,’ but it really is. There’s this break there, and it’s just irreparable. It just happens. I don’t know if he ever really gets over it. That’s the real answer,” Colin says.

Will things be patched up with Laurel? “That’s a good question,” he laughs. “You’re going to see in 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, really, all of that stuff with the three of us is going to come to a head. There’s some good stuff coming.”

On working with John Barrowman as his father, Malcolm Merlyn: “We have a blast,” Colin says. “One of my favorite times was in 16. we’re in that huge action sequence, right? Tons of people around, and we’re running up and down… Glen [Winter] did such an amazing job with that episode. There’s a time when we’re running up this escalator, and he’s ‘we’re going through it, gonna run up the escalator and things are going to be awesome,’ and the escalator was running, right? So we come up, and then we come back down, and Glen’s trying to do something, and we go down like musical comedy acts, just cracking everybody up. It’s so fun. We have a blast. We come from the same kind of background, so we like to keep things light. When we have to work, we have to work, but it’s fun.”

Although Tommy doesn’t seem to remember his father almost showing him a particular room, it is not to say that he might not learn about his dad’s Dark Archer-ness later. “I’ve been saying this a bit lately: I think if [Malcolm] was willing to show him once, there’s no reason to think that he maybe wouldn’t show him again. You never know,” he teases.

So did Tommy see everything in the Arrow pilot? “He saw it,” Colin confirms. “He saw it. He saw the whole thing. It was fun, because when we were shooting the pilot, that was our very first day of shooting, was that sequence, and I remember David Nutter coming over and he had that little eye flutter, and he said ‘we’re going to use this later. That’s going to be the big question.’ And he did. He saw that whole thing. He saw him murder a guy with the back of a chair.”

Do we see Tommy in the pre-island flashback episode? “You don’t,” he admits. “You will see Malcolm. You will see Colin Salmon, actually. You see Walter in the flashbacks. Yeah. They came with that in a really cool way. It’s neat to see all of these people. I think everybody saw that picture of Stephen pre-island that he posted,” he laughs.

You want some video? You can find the entire roundtable video interview below. Please be aware that there are even some spoilers discussed for tonight’s episode within, and there are a few topics not covered in the excerpts above. Enjoy: