Being a teenager is hard enough, but when you’re a demigod, things get really complicated. These complications as well as the titanic battles are at the heart of season 3 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” which will be released on Disney+ in November. The cast and showrunners spoke with Variety at Lucca Comics.
Walker Scobell, who plays Percy Jackson, has gone from curly-haired rascal to a 17-year-old who elicits feverish 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.
In addition to growing up together since the series began 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, most energetic,” Scobell says. “London is very calm 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 did they feel like they were evolving as actors from the 13-16 year olds they were originally with? Simhadri, the eldest 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 one day in season 3 where I 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 so long: your character helps you, and you help your character. Like you’re both growing, like you’re truly in a friendship with someone in a strange way.”
For Jeffries, it’s yelling, “Have you seen those interviews where they ask the girl to scream and then she screams out of nowhere. No, Dad, I can’t do that.” She laughed, “Sorry, I’m using my school slang.” »
“I think for Percy, at least a lot of it is the writing,” Scobell says. “I can’t do much because most of the time it’s just Percy explaining things to him and then taking action. So there’s only so much room for improvement there.”
“It’s a good thing that it’s a lot darker this season, which I’m very happy about because for me personally, I love playing dark scenes,” Jeffries says. “I like playing arguments and big scenes – stuff like that.”
“There are minor changes in our storyline compared to the books,” says Simhadri. “Our writers are so incredible that it would almost be disrespectful not to honor what they put on the page. We do so much preparation: we learn the books inside and out, that way, on the day itself, we can just focus.”
With Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” dominating the big screen this summer, it seems like a good time for Greek mythology. Jonathan E. Steinberg, co-creator – with author Rick Riordan – and showrunner, comments: “It was fun to see all this when ‘The Odyssey’ came out. Obviously, ‘Sea of Monsters’ (season 2) came out six or eight months earlier. People who thought ‘The Odyssey’ was too mature for their kids, they could show them ‘Sea of Monsters’. So it was a nice little connection that was happening.
There’s a hint of Russell Mulcahy’s fantastical 1986 “Highlander” in the opening moments of the new season. Is this part of a move towards an older audience? “I think somewhere Craig Silverstein (another showrunner) is smiling,” said executive producer and showrunner Dan Shotz: “There are homages to a lot of the films that are coming. The kids who read these books for the first time at 12, there’s this step in how the show evolves, how we put more pressure on them. It’s been a much heavier season, even with the conversations we have behind the scenes about what they’re dealing with, the loss and the struggle. It was pretty crazy to explore that with these actors who can Part of the reason is that they grew up with the show. They started when they were 13, and now they’re more mature and they can handle that.
What’s it like to see the “Harry Potter” franchise move from the big screen? Is there a feeling of competition? “I don’t know if it’s healthy for us to think of ourselves in competition with anything,” Steinberg says. “If you do 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’re in conversation with the book, and we get to be in conversation with the book and the author, and that lives within the four walls of the process. We have friends in this show, and we hope it goes well.”
Season 3 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” premieres November 20 on Disney+.
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