How the new “Percy Jackson” brings Camp Half-Blood and Capture the Flag to screen

Leah Jeffries, Charlie Bushnell, and director James Bobin tease the Disney+ adaptation's epic game.

What Quidditch is for Harry Potter, Capture the Flag is for Percy Jackson and the Olympians. For the demigods who gather and train at Camp Half-Blood, the classic outdoor sport is the primary way to prove their worth as a child of Greek gods — especially since they’re allowed to wear armor and wield special weapons, like the electric spear of Ares’ daughter Clarisse (Dior Goodjohn) or Percy’s own special sword Riptide.

For years, book readers have played their own versions of demigod Capture the Flag. Every summer, day camps in city parks like New York’s Prospect Park swarm with kids in orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirts, wielding homemade (and decidedly non-lethal!) swords and shields. So the team behind the new Disney+ adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians knew they had to nail Capture the Flag. The first step, of course, was building Camp Half-Blood.

“I really wanted to make a place that felt timeless,” says James Bobin, who directed the first few episodes of the show. “It shouldn't feel new because, even though it's moved around a lot, it's always these same old buildings. And I liked the idea that the woods around it have grown up around the cabins, which are made of different materials, often reflecting the nature or the substance associated with that particular god. And so some are stone, some are wood, and some are different shapes. I wanted to build a place that when you watched the show, you wanted to go there.”

Once Camp Half-Blood was built, it was time to play. All of the young actors EW spoke to from Percy Jackson and the Olympians agreed that filming the big Capture the Flag sequence in the second episode was basically just like playing a huge game.

“It reminded me of the good old days back at summer camp,” says Charlie Bushnell, who plays older camper Luke Castellan. “It was so much fun. It was like my dream come true. When I was a kid, I would be out there with my friends with Nerf swords, pretending to sword fight. This obviously was on a much bigger scale, and it just felt like a real battle was going on.”

That’s not to say it was easy, though. Leah Jeffries, who plays Percy’s friend Annabeth Chase, had a particularly harrowing experience on the big day. As the daughter of the wisdom goddess Athena, Annabeth is usually unflappable. Bobin has lots of praise for Jeffries’ contained performance, especially in these early episodes when Annabeth is content to hold back and observe Percy (Walker Scobell) as he navigates his first days at camp. But while Jeffries was playing it cool during Capture the Flag, she got struck by a creepy-crawly surprise.

“That day it was so hot and I had all that dark armor on me. I was dying,” Jeffries recalls, to the shock of her costars. “And then on top of that, a spider actually crawled up inside of my armor. It literally looked like a poisonous spider. It was big and black. I felt something tickling me, and I looked down as its head was going right up into my arm guard. I was about to cry. That was really bad.”

Other participants had a happier time, thankfully. Bobin, who was first introduced to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books years ago by his kids, got to return the favor by bringing them to set for the big game.

“My son's birthday was on the day we were shooting,” Bobin says. “The props guy said to me, ‘You know what? We've got a spare set, he can have this whole set of Greek armor to take home with him.’ So at the end of day, I called everyone over and said, ‘This is Wilkie’s birthday and as a present, he's allowed to keep his armor.’ I've never seen him so happy.”

The creators of Percy Jackson and the Olympians are hoping that fans everywhere have just as much fun when the series premieres Dec. 20 on Disney+ — though they can’t promise everyone will get their own set of armor.

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