Gods and monsters
As Percy Jackson & the Olympians returns to Disney+ for a second season, DQ speaks to author Rick Riordan, execs Dan Shotz, Jonathan E Steinberg and Craig Silverstein, and stars Leah Sava Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri and Daniel Diemer about making this epic adventure series.
When author Rick Riordan was a boy, he became captivated by Greek mythology, the stories of gods on Mount Olympus and how they were used to understand the human condition.
When he later became a father, he passed on his fascination to his nine-year-old son through bedtime stories featuring a young demigod – half god, half human – named Percy Jackson.
Riordan has since become the bestselling author of a fantasy book series based on that character, selling more than 100 million copies and inspiring two feature films – Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief (2010) and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013).
The writer wasn’t involved in the films, finding that the scripts carried a different tone from his own work. In fact, “once I read the scripts, I did not ever see the feature films. I knew they would break my heart. I couldn’t do it,” he tells DQ. “Percy needs to be on the verge in those middle grades. He needs to be on the verge of becoming a teenager coming into his own as a person, still having that sense of wonder, that sense of innocence, and we need to watch him grow into his powers. We can’t start with him as an 18-year-old. It just doesn’t work.”
But when the opportunity arrived to bring his stories to television, Riordan became co-creator and executive producer on a new adaptation titled Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and sought to bring his books to the screen in a way that stays closer to his original vision.
Debuting on Disney+ in 2023, the series introduces Percy, a 12-year-old modern demigod who discovers his father is Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. He is just coming to terms with his newfound divine powers when the sky god, Zeus, accuses him of stealing his master lightning bolt. With help from his friends Grover and Annabeth, Percy must embark on an adventure of a lifetime to find it and restore order to Olympus.
In season two, which launched earlier this month, Percy embarks on an epic odyssey into the Sea of Monsters in search of Grover and the one thing that might save demigod training facility Camp Half-Blood – the legendary Golden Fleece. With help from Annabeth and his newfound cyclops half-brother Tyson, Percy’s survival becomes essential to stopping a plot to bring down the camp – and ultimately, Olympus.
“The ambition was to create the kind of storytelling and the kind of show I grew up on, which was something I didn’t think twice about watching with my family,” says fellow EP Craig Silverstein. “We all felt invested in it. It’s hard to find a live-action space, and Rick’s books and this story really felt like a great blueprint for that and a great key into a door that would open up that kind of universe for us.”
Dan Shotz, who showruns Percy Jackson with co-creator Jonathan E Steinberg, carried the same hopes for the series. “The dream when we started out was [to tell] a story where it’s for everyone, that families can sit down and watch together every night and be excited about as a unit. Now that everyone is off on their own devices, watching their own thing, it’s like, how can you find a story and tell a story that will bring everyone together and they can share the experience?”
Since the show’s launch, Riordan has been thrilled with the way fans have embraced Percy Jackson & the Olympians – and the casting of Walker Scobell (Percy), Leah Sava Jeffries (Annabeth Chase), Aryan Simhadri (Grover Underwood) and Charlie Bushnell (Luke) alongside recurring and guest stars such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jason Mantzoukas, Glynn Turman, Margaret Cho and Toby Stephens.
One lesson the creative team learned on S1 was how to capture Percy’s sense of humour, the author says. “It’s tricky, because in the books we’re in his head 100% of the time. We’re hearing his thoughts and his snarky side comments, but he doesn’t say those out loud. So how do you translate the humour? That’s still a work in progress, although when fans see the second season, they’ll agree we’re learning and we’re on the right track.”
Riordan spent S1 “learning the ropes” of television production and where he could lend a hand, most obviously with the scripts and then supporting casting. He also breaks down each book into eight episodic chunks for the show’s writing team to then discuss and develop further. S1 is based on Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief, with S2 tackling The Sea of Monsters. The upcoming third season, which was announced in March and is already well into production, will take its lead from The Titan’s Curse.
With Riordan’s support, “then we start to move those pieces around and go from there,” Steinberg says. “We’re playing with what’s in and what’s out, and how it gets told, all the way through to the editing.” But though some elements might be left out, for instance if plot points or monsters are duplicative, the adaptations “are pretty faithful,” he continues. “There are sequences and lines that are straight out of the book.”
“We honour the books. These are beloved books, and fans are expecting certain things from them,” Shotz says. “But what’s been good about working with Rick directly is he knows, ‘OK, these are the important things to hold on to. These are some things we can change. But it’s an adaptation. I don’t think anybody wants just a straight book report. They want to find new things in it – and it’s actually been cool. I know a lot of kids have the book out while they’re watching the show and studying, and they get to kind of play along. That’s what makes the experience really fun for them.”
Bringing their own ideas to the story has a lot to do with removing the books’ first-person perspective, with the execs keen to introduce new elements for other characters – and to allow Scobell to enjoy an occasional day off from filming.
“When you start to see some things he didn’t see, that changes the storytelling in surprising ways, in a rippling effect,” Steinberg says. But from saving the world in season one to embarking on another epic odyssey in S2, the key is to keep the characters – and Percy in particular – on their toes at all times.
“Well, he gets the rug pulled out from under him right away [in S2],” Steinberg says. “He saved the world, he’s feeling good, and then all of a sudden, there’s a new director at camp who’s a jerk. Grover has been captured. Annabeth and him aren’t getting along so well, and he’s got this new cyclops half-brother, so you just continue to shake him up. Then he might learn that it’s not just about the world, it’s about the universe.”
Returning to the Vancouver set for S2, Simhadri and Jeffries had the opportunity to build on their characters from S1, finding that they could no longer assume the Grover and Annabeth they play are the same characters that exist in Riordan’s books.
“Obviously, they’re the same person, but there are so many little changes that happen in the show that stack up and change Grover in pretty large ways at the end of the day,” says Simhadri. “Coming into season two, it was an interesting thing to come back to, and I felt a lot more confident. I knew what my preparation process was. I’m still finding it, but I knew it better. The relationship with the producers and the writers and all of the executives, they’re as much a part of this family as we are. And we always pitch them weird little ideas from the book that we think fans would love to see or that we just want to see, and they listen, which is the best part. They listen to our ideas and they’re very collaborative.”
Almost immediately, the friendship forged between Percy, Annabeth and Grover in S1 is split apart in S2 as Grover determines to follow his own path as a satyr and Lord of the Wild, with Daniel Diemer joining the ensemble as Percy’s cyclops half-brother Tyson.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but [S2] is way better than what I thought, better than the first season for sure,” laughs Jeffries, sitting alongside Simhadri. “Of course, we missed the relationship we had with Aryan, with Grover, and we were like, ‘Dang, it’s gonna be so sad without him.’ And then when Daniel came, we built a new [trio]. It wasn’t just like, ‘Well, we’re gonna find someone to fill that void.’ It was a whole new thing.”
Diemer had some early talks with Shotz about playing Tyson, and was warmed by the support of his new cast and crewmates. But how did he enjoy playing a cyclops? “It’s a relatively boring answer,” he says. “They made it so easy for me. No prosthetics, no dots, no blindfolds. It was great. I just got to be able to connect with them [the other actors] as humanly as possible and allow them [the creative team] to do all their magic afterwards.”
Making the series proved to be quite the bonding experience for all the actors, who ended up spending more time together than they might have imagined while travelling and living together on location.
“In certain places, you couldn’t go back to your house, so you had to be at the hotel. That also put a forced bond on us, which I was very grateful for,” says Jeffries. “Sometimes you think, ‘Oh, we’re close enough, we’re fine.’ But it builds something that you didn’t know it actually needed.”
“The biggest challenge on season two was just the fact that everything was more real,” notes Simhadri. “Not to discount anything that happened in season one, but you’re on the volume [virtual production] stage and everything’s kind of CG, and you’re acting with these huge blue screens. It can be really easy – and I’m strictly speaking for myself, because these are acting challenges I bumped up against. It can be really easy when you don’t see what you’re acting against, to just kind of be like, ‘Yeah, they’ll probably fix it in post, I don’t really have to go all in. It’s not even here.’
“Season two, you don’t have that to fall back on. Everything is just [more] real, so there’s nowhere to go. You just have to go all in. That was the biggest challenge, but also the greatest part of filming.”
For the creative team, making the series has been about avoiding a “compromised” version of Riordan’s epic adventures. “You want to feel like there’s no boundaries around it,” Steinberg says. “You go into it with that level of ambition and put a team together that has achieved that in a number of different directions and you just keep throwing stuff at it until, eventually, you get there.
“Choosing your targets is important, but making sure that some of those targets are the ones that are still scary and that you may not have answers for at the beginning is healthy. The process is all about trying to keep the bar high and making sure that every time we get over it, we raise it again.”
With production on S3 “well underway,” Riordan is “very pleased” with everything he’s seen so far, especially from new actors Levi Chrisopulos and Olive Abercrombie as siblings Nico and Bianca di Angelo. “They’re amazing, and they’re doing an incredible job with their roles,” he says. “The fans will be very pleased with that. I can’t wait to share the design of the sets too. They’ve outdone themselves.”
“There’s a little bit of shooting to go,” Steinberg says. “It’s going great. The same as in the books, there’s always a year jump. This time, though, to season three, there’s only six months, and it starts in the winter. So we mix it up a little bit, as Rick does in the book.”
There’s “a whole new palette,” adds Shotz. “It’s just fun to be in the winter and snow and start that way, rather than just in the pretty summer.”
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tagged in: Aryan Simhadri, Craig Silverstein, Dan Shotz, Daniel Diemer, Disney, Jonathan E Steinberg, Leah Sava Jeffries, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Rick Riordan