Percy Jackson and the Olympians Creative Team Reveals Favorite Moments and Easter Eggs In New Series
The beloved Percy Jackson book series by author Rick Riordan is getting a new life in the form on a TV series coming to Disney+. It finds 12-year-old Percy Jackson coming to terms with the fact that he’s a modern day demigod when he’s accused of stealing Zeus’s master lightning bolt. With the help of new friends, Percy must restore order to Mount Olympus. Kristen Maldonado of Pop Culture Planet spoke with the creative team behind Percy Jackson and the Olympians at New York Comic Con.
The creative team knew they needed to trust in their own love of Percy Jackson and the world that Rick Riordan created when it came to bringing this story to life. “It's such a brilliant book and Rick did a great job with it. The character is so relatable and wonderful that people really feel that it's part of their lives and their childhood. It's like when I did Muppets. People always said, ‘Muppets is a part of my childhood, so be careful,’” director James Bobin told me. “I feel the same way about Percy. I know Percy really well. I know what I love about him and so I'm going to do right by him.”
The dynamic between the trio of Walker Scobell, Leah Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri was just “incredible” on set. “These kids are so amazing. Not only just the talent, but as people. It's rare to find. You're putting three people together, how are they going to fit? You don't really know until you get there,” said Dan Shotz. “They just fell in love with each other and the crew fell in love with them and then they just played off of all of these amazing guest stars. These amazing actors showed up and they would show up sometimes for two weeks, sometimes for two days, and the kids brought everybody into the family immediately. That was what made the whole environment special, which really says something about the the show as a whole.”
Jon Steinberg continued: “We could not have been luckier with those kids. They were able to do things that 12 and 13 and 14-year-old actors really can't do that frequently and go to emotional places and and pull off comic timing that that's really complicated and and takes good actors a long time to figure out. They really brought it.”
“Percy is Percy from the books,” confirmed Bobin. “The actor can't help but bring some of himself to that, but Walker is such a fantastic kid that that was good. He is Percy-like in his nature. He's mischievous a bit, but he's really sweet and charming and vulnerable and cool. He’s an interesting guys so that was great that he brought parts of himself to the character.”
What the VFX team realized early on was that, while it was key “starting with the book,” not everything is fleshed out. That leaves room to play. “There’s a line that says, ‘Riptide appears.’ We wanted to make sure that it was unique for us.” said VFX supervisor Erik Henry. “We came up with the idea that it would be a piece of blown glass that would stretch and therefore you don't immediately say, ‘I've seen that before.’”
The team was almost able to be like the Greek gods themselves as they built characters like the Minotaur from scratch. “From a design perspective, we would get parameters. We like these elements from these different animals and [then it’s like] what's the anatomy of this thing? We were designing the bones that go inside the Minotaur and how is it going to transfer from a quadruped, which has a very different style of locomotion, to a bipad and still work as a creature. Like how all the bones and muscles of that work under the skin,” ILM VFX supervisor Jeff White shared. “We get this amazing playground to to try and figure this stuff out, but it is a lot of design work at the end of the day to try and figure out how to bring these things to life.”
Speaking of the Minotaur, that was one of the most difficult scenes to direct. “The Minotaur fight is a challenging sequence because it's a car, in the rain, in the dark with the bull chasing it. Then it's a gigantic crash and a fight between a boy and a bull who stands up,” revealed Bobin. “I was thrilled with how that turned out because it's a lot of work. When the volume stage gets wet, it's not a great place to be because it was a muddy field. Imagine the amount of water you put in 10 minutes, it just absolutely soaked. It was really crazy, but to get that right was really challenging and pleasing.”
Another big moment was the reveal of Tartarus. “There’s a scene where Percy and Grover come over a hill and you see Tartarus, the Underworld. That to me is like that moment of he’s seen it in his dreams and this is a moment where he’s like, ‘Oh, what’s that like being confronted by your nightmares?’” shared Henry. “It looks like an open hole that wants to eat Grover as he's sliding toward it and so Percy has to grab him and use Riptide to hold the two of them to save Grover. It's a really important moment and that's probably my favorite.”
“Everything we did had huge layers of detail and depth,” shared production designer Dan Hennah, citing turning Vancouver into New York and bringing to life the iconic Camaro. Some of his favorite elements were adding things to the background of scenes that really set the scene. “The headmaster's office where Percy's being told off, there are elements we put into that. Like a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware. It’s serious stuff, but it's fun and it's the background and sets the tone for what the school's about and how serious they are. We had a Hieronymus Bosch behind the headmaster. It’s all stuff that kids who really care will know or certainly see and it check out.”
Even creating the costumes was a “labor of love,” said costume designer Tish Monaghan. “My tree people, the Dryads, were my favorite because it was a difficult task. We basically had to make walking tree, but making them look beautiful, not make them look jokey. It was mean to be ethereal.” She also shared that the armor for the kids at Camp Half-Blood was all made of leather and painted to look like metal armor.
Between the books and the original films, eagle eyed fans may spot any number of Easter eggs and references throughout the series. “If you notice something in this show that feels like it’s intended to tease something from a later book or it’s a wink at you from something within this book, you should feel pretty confident that that’s exactly what it is,” shared Steinberg, even giving a nod to the Broadway musical. “I wouldn’t tell you to discount it. Having Rick and Becky [Riordan] and Joe Tracz, who wrote the Percy Jackson musical who's on our writing staff, and all of the people who've been so involved with this universe as a part of the show makes it easy for people to throw ideas in of like,’ Hey, you know what I read on a fan board at one point? What if we throw a little nod here?’”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians debuts December 20 on Disney+.
