SMELLS LIKE DEMIGOD SPIRIT
Rick Riordan, Walker Scobell, and others from the ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ team talk Lin-Manuel Miranda, monsters, and more.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Disney
Fighting a minotaur can be a pretty daunting task. But according to Walker Scobell, the 14-year-old star of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, it’s actually… funny. Yes, that’s right. Fighting a monstrous, sweaty, smelly beast is hilarious.
At least, this is what Scobell tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed while chatting about Disney+’s new adaptation of Rick Riordan’s novel series of the same name. The minotaur fight—which happens in the first episode, set to release on Dec. 20—was the biggest, trickiest battle of the season, Scobell says. And for some reason, he found himself giggling on set.
“You can’t really see me smiling because it was raining so much, but it was hard to get used to fighting a guy in a skin-tight suit and holding a minotaur’s head,” Scobell recalls. Fighting these CGI monsters, especially as a preteen, was tricky—even if it made him laugh too.
Scobell had to get used to it, because, as Percy Jackson, he has a plethora of monsters to battle beyond that minotaur. The first season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, based on The Lightning Thief, follows young Percy as he acclimates to demigod (which, for those who don’t know, means he has one human parent and one parent who is a god) life. There’s a huge battle breaking out between three huge names in the god world—Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; imagine if the Jonas Brothers got into a major tiff—and Percy may be the only one who can get them to settle their differences.
When we meet ahead of the show’s premiere, Scobell is joined by his two co-stars, Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri, who play Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood. They gush about their favorite monster scenes together; Scobell mentions a sequence featuring Medusa, while Jeffries loved fighting an Echidna (another monster) on a train, although it was “so hot” on set.
But Simhadri seems to have recalled the best monster scene. Scobell and Jeffries nod aggressively after their castmate says the words, “Crusty’s waterbed shop.” Why was that such a hit? “We got to lay in water beds all day,” Simhadri explains.
The trio of young actors are as bubbly and energetic as you’d expect them to be—with each new question, they all gasp at once while thinking of the answer. The question about their favorite monster gets a big “OOOH,” but the biggest “OOOOOOOHHH” comes when I ask about working with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who plays Hermes.
“He’s exactly like how you’d imagine Lin-Manuel Miranda to act,” Scobell says. “He’d randomly break out into song.”
Naturally, I wonder: Which songs did Miranda sing on set? Anything from Hamilton? Nope. Scobell giggles. “Well, Nirvana,” he offers up. I give him a confused look. Scobell looks over at Jeffries, who sighs. “Do you want to tell her your story?”
“It’s a long story,” she says. Jeffries then gives me the low-down: During rehearsals before the team shot Percy Jackson and the Olympians, she showed up wearing a Nirvana sweatshirt. Miranda complimented Jeffries on the shirt: “Hey! I really like that band,” Jeffries recalls him saying.
Her response sent Miranda into hysterics: “That’s a band?”
“He just started dying and screaming,” Jeffries said. “He literally rolled on the floor back and forth, [slammed] into chairs, like, ‘No! Wait, what did you think it was?’ And I was like, ‘Um, I thought it was a clothing brand.’”
The next day, at around six in the morning, Miranda came to set ready to teach his young music apprentice. He blasted Nirvana for Jeffries, who has since become a fan. “It was stuck in my head for so long,” she says, although she admits that when Miranda said he was going to “show her some stuff” on his speaker, she thought it might be something from his next musical, not “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Creating the world of Camp Half-Blood and beyond
While the kids spent their days on set giggling about fighting people in CGI suits, co-creator Jonathan E. Steinberg was behind the scenes, figuring out how to create these larger-than-life brutes. The minotaur was tricky. But Medusa, who rears her snaky head in Episode 3, was the hardest, Steinberg says.
“It took a little while to figure out that she wasn’t a monster,” Steinberg tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. But the team faced the same issue with most of the monsters, he goes on. “How do you do something new that’s been done for thousands of years, thousands of times, and still have it be recognizable? There are a million minotaurs out there, and somehow, we needed to figure out a way to make sure that this one was both ours and also had some fidelity to the mythology.”
On top of being a unique entry within the realm of Greek mythology, this is also the third iteration of Percy Jackson’s story that’s entering the world. On top of Riordan’s original novel series, Chris Columbus directed adaptations of the first and second novels in 2010 and 2013. Riordan has been vocal about his support for Disney’s take, while he’s been outspoken against Columbus’ films—which, years after they released, he compared to having his “life’s work” put through a “meat grinder.”
Steinberg says that the team looks to create something entirely new for Percy Jackson fans with this latest take.
“To be honest, I didn’t want to pay a lot of attention to the [other adaptations],” Steinberg says. “I feel like this story has been so historically successful in connecting to so many different people all around the world. There is something happening on the page of this story that is magical. I wanted to just go right back to that and start as if no one had ever tried to do anything with it because it didn’t matter.”
Disney
Everything in Percy Jackson and the Olympians—from Camp Half-Blood to the mythical beasts that roam just outside—mirrors what’s in the book. In fact, when I ask Riordan which scene caused him the most déjà vu, he wants to list off every moment. “It’s a wonderful problem, but I’m having trouble choosing because there were actually so many that felt like that,” Riordan says. “It’s a great dilemma.”
Ultimately, he settles on the capture the flag scene in Episode 2. “That felt like the scene that I remember imagining in my head,” Riordan says of the Camp Half-Blood scene. “[We were] on the beach watching kids fight each other with swords. Totally normal day.”
Some scenes feel so faithful to Riordan’s work that it was sometimes easy to forget which ones were invented for the show. Becky Riordan, an executive producer (and Rick’s wife), explains this phenomenon: “The intro that you’ve seen where there’s young Percy and then the headmaster’s running through the school and he’s on the roof—that isn’t in the book,” she adds. “But there’s Percy’s voiceover, which is the book—modified just slightly—but [that scene] feels like the book.”
Most of that authenticity, executive producer Dan Shotz tells us, came from Rick Riordan’s prominent involvement in the adaptation. With Riordan’s help, the creative team could translate that into a TV series that felt true to Percy Jackson, even when it veered from the books’ original storylines.
“[By] partnering with Rick, we understood everything [about] where this came from, how important it was to his family, how truthful and honest the story came from, the origin of a father telling a son a story,” Shotz says. “When it comes from that, it feels like you can do anything with it because it’s so honest.”
The most valuable lesson the team learned from the Riordans, Shotz adds, is that the series has always been meant to be a way to welcome children into the wonderful world of reading.
“Rick told us early on that a lot of parents have said ‘thank you’ to him just because the books made their kids fall in love with reading,” Shotz says. “For both of us, as fathers, the books did the same thing for our kids in many ways.”
What comes next for Percy Jackson?
There are five novels in the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, the last of which was published in 2009. Seeing as the first season so far closely follows The Lightning Thief, we may be headed toward The Sea of Monsters and beyond for future seasons. While Percy Jackson hasn’t been renewed for a second season yet, thanks to the popularity of the books another season is a fair expectation. With that in mind, we want to know which book the Percy team would be most excited to adapt.
Jeffries chooses book four, The Battle of the Labyrinth. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she says. “It’s like we’re right there at the end. It’s like the intro to everything. I feel like, in four, there’s a difference to it. There are real stakes. And then the fifth is just the outro of the intro.”
Becky is a big Sea of Monsters fan, which would hypothetically be the basis of Percy Jackson’s next season. “I love that it’s really faithful to the original myths in a lot of ways,” Becky explains. “I love that we get to spend more time with Grover. Annabeth goes through some really serious personal growth in that book, too. Plus, the monsters. You can’t lose with that book.”
Nearly everyone else we ask, however, has the same answer.
Johnny Louis/Getty Images
“The fifth one,” Steinberg says, naming The Last Olympians with no hesitation. “Everybody’s got an eye on that one as a significant production challenge.”
Shotz quickly follows: “Significant production challenges. We tease Rick all the time, like, ‘You did not take it easy on us, man!’ But that’s why they’re so special. It’s like, every new book has got an entirely new world to dive into. The possibilities are endless.”
“It’s an expansive world,” Rick says, adding, “We talked a lot about this early on, that this show was almost designed to be difficult, in that we’re working with young actors, we have a road trip, and in every single episode, it’s a new set. Nothing is reused.” And yet, Rick explains, “We found a way to do it that really worked.”
Meanwhile, Scobell’s explanation for why he’s excited about The Last Olympians is a little different. “We all get buffed, power-wise,” he says of Percy, Annabeth, and Grover. “We all get jacked.”
For now, though, all of the Percy Jackson team is happy to release its adaptation of The Lightning Thief. They see it as a love letter to all kinds of fans, from folks who have been loving the series since 2005 to younger kids who are just getting into reading.
“I hope people like [the show],” Rick says. “We compare it to having a child. At some point, the kid’s born. You just have to support it the best you can.”
