Being a teenager is hard enough, but things get really complicated when you become a demigod. These challenges, along with massive battles, are at the center of Season 3 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” which will air on Disney+ in November. Actors and series producers spoke Diversity at Lucca Comics.
Playing Percy Jackson, Walker Scobell transformed from a curly-haired drifter into a 17-year-old who drew heated screams from grateful fans. Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri, who play Percy’s best friends Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood, have also become fan favorites and close friends in real life.
Not only have they grown together since the series began four years ago, they also find the atmosphere of Comic Cons, like Lucca Comics, a unifying experience: “I feel like Italy and Brazil are the biggest, happiest, most energetic countries,” says Scobell. “London is very quiet but lively. If you can make the crowd in London laugh, that’s a great feeling.” “Going from Brazil to London was crazy, the difference,” says Jeffries.
How did they feel they had improved as players when they were initially between the ages of 13-16? “I used to have a really hard time crying on set,” says Simhadri, 20, the oldest of the three. “I’ve always found it very difficult, and there was one day in Season 3 where I had to actually cry, and now I find it really easy. That’s the whole point of being on a TV show for so long: your character helps you, and you help your character. It’s like you’re both growing together, like you’re actually in a friendship with someone in a weird way.”
For Jeffries, that’s screaming: “Have you seen those interviews where they ask the girl to scream and then all of a sudden she starts screaming? No, dad, I can’t do that.” He laughs: “Sorry, I’m using school slang.”
“I think for Percy at least a big part of it came from the writing,” Scobell says. “There’s only so much I can do because most of the time it just takes Percy to explain things to himself and then take action. So there’s a lot of room to grow there.”
“It’s a good thing that this season is a lot darker, and that makes me very happy because I personally love doing dark genre scenes,” Jeffries says. “I love sparring and doing big scenes – stuff like that.”
“There are minor changes in our script compared to the books,” says Simhadri. “Our writers are so incredible that it would almost be disrespectful not to respect what they put on the page. We do so much preparation, we learn the books inside and out, so we can just focus on the day.”
It seems like an auspicious moment for Greek Mythology, with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” dominating the big screen in the summer. “It was a lot of fun to see all of this when ‘The Odyssey’ came out,” says Jonathan E. Steinberg, co-creator and showrunner along with writer Rick Riordan. “Obviously, ‘Sea of Monsters’ [Season 2] It came out six or eight months ago. Those who thought ‘Odyssey’ was too mature for their children could show them ‘Sea of Monsters’. So it was a nice little connection that happened.”
There’s a hint of Russell Mulcahy’s 1986 fantasy “Highlander” in the first few minutes of the new season. Is this part of the shift to an older audience? “I think somewhere Craig Silverstein [fellow showrunner] smiles,” says executive producer and showrunner Dan Shotz. “There are nods to a lot of forward-looking movies. Kids who read these books for the first time at age 12 are taking a step into how the series will develop and how we put harder pressure on them. Despite the conversations we had behind the scenes about what they were dealing with, the losses and struggles, this has been a much heavier season. It was pretty crazy to explore this with these actors who could actually handle it. Part of it is that they grew up with the show. They started when they were 13, now they are more mature and can handle it. “This part was amazing to watch.”
How does it feel to see the “Harry Potter” series transferred to the big screen? Is there a sense of competition? “I don’t know if it’s healthy to think about ourselves when we’re in competition with anything,” Steinberg says. “If you’re doing it right, the process of finding a way to tell a story that feels right, that feels emotionally surprising, that feels engaging, that feels fun, and all of that, is a process in itself. When you’re in an adaptation exercise, you’re in conversation with the book, and we’re lucky enough to be in conversation with the book and its author, and it lives within the four walls of that process. We have friends in this program, and we hope it turns out great.”
Season 3 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” will premiere on Disney+ on November 20.