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Being a teenager is hard enough but when you’re a demigod, things get genuinely complicated. These complications along with titanic battles are at the heart of Season 3 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” due to drop
on Disney+ in November. The cast and showrunners spoke to Variety at Lucca Comics.
Walker Scobell, who plays Percy Jackson, has gone from curly-haired scamp to a 17-year-old who draws fevered screams from his appreciative fans. Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri, who play Percy’s best friends Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood, respectively, have also become fan favorites and close friends in real life.
As well as growing up together since the series started four years ago, they find the atmosphere of Comic Cons like Lucca Comics a bonding experience: “I feel like Italy and Brazil are the biggest, happiest and most energetic,” Scobell says. “London is very quiet but engaged. If you can make the London crowd laugh, it’s a great feeling.” “Going from Brazil to London was crazy, the difference,” Jeffries says.
How have they felt themselves develop as actors from the 13-16 year olds they were to begin with? Simhadri, the oldest of the three at 20, says: “I used to have a really hard time crying on set. I always found it really difficult, and there was a day on Season 3 where I just had to really sob, and now I find it really easy. That’s kind of the whole point of being on a TV show for such a long time: your character helps you, and you help your character. Like you both grow together, like you’re genuinely in a friendship with someone in a weird way.”
For Jeffries, it’s screaming: “Have you seen those interviews where they’ll ask the girl to scream and then she’ll just scream out of nowhere. Nah, daddy, I can’t do that.” She laughs: “Sorry, I’m using my school slang.”
“I think for Percy at least a lot of it is the writing,” Scobell says. “There’s only so much I can do because a lot of the time it’s just Percy having things explained to him, and then action. So, there’s only so much room in there to grow.”
“It’s a good thing that it’s so much darker this season, which I’m very happy about because for me personally, I love playing the dark type of scenes,” Jeffries says. “I like playing the arguing and big scenes – stuff like that.”
“There are minor changes in our script versus the books,” Simhadri says. “Our writers are so incredible that it would be almost disrespectful to not honor what they’ve put on the page. We do so much preparation: we learn the books inside and out, so that way on the day we can just focus.”
With Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” ruling the big screen in the summer, it seems like a propitious moment for Greek Mythology. Jonathan E. Steinberg, co-creator – along with author Rick Riordan – and showrunner, comments: “It was fun seeing all that when ‘The Odyssey’ came out. Obviously, ‘Sea of Monsters’ [Season 2] came out six or eight months before. People who felt ‘The Odyssey’ was too mature for their kids, they could show them ‘Sea of Monsters.’ So, it was a good little connection that was happening.”
There’s a hint of Russell Mulcahy’s 1986 fantasy “Highlander” in the first few moments of the new season. Is this part of a shift towards an older audience? “I think somewhere Craig Silverstein [fellow showrunner] is smiling,” executive producer and showrunner Dan Shotz says: “There are homages to lots of films going forward. Kids who first read those books at 12, there is this step up to how the show evolves, how we are putting tougher pressure on them. This has been a much heavier season, even with the conversations we have behind the scenes about what they’re dealing with, loss and struggle. It’s been pretty wild to explore that with these actors who can really handle it. Part of it is that they have grown with the show. They started when they were 13, and now they’re more mature and they can handle it. That part has been awesome to watch.”
How does it feel to see the “Harry Potter” franchise transfer from the big screen? Is there a sense of competition? “I don’t know that it’s healthy for us to be thinking about ourselves in competition with anything,” Steinberg says. “If you’re doing this right, the process of trying to find a way to tell a story that feels true, that feels emotionally surprising and engaging and fun and all of those things is its own process. When you’re in an adaptation exercise, you are in conversation with the book, and we are lucky enough to be in conversation with the book and its author, and that lives within the four walls of the process. We have friends on that show, and we hope that it does great.”
“Percy Jackson and the Olympians” Season 3 will premiere Nov. 20 on Disney+.
