‘Percy Jackson & The Olympians’ Creator Rick Riordan Makes Surprise Appearance At NYCC Panel & Fans Get Preview Of Premiere Episode

Sean Piccoli
·5 min read
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He wasn’t on the speakers’ list, but Percy Jackson & The Olympians creator Rick Riordan staged a surprise last-minute walk-on Sunday at New York Comic Con with his wife, Becky Riordan.

The couple closed out a jam-packed panel for the upcoming Disney+ adaptation of author Riordan’s beloved, modern-day-mythological fantasy novels about a boy who learns he is the half-human son of the sea god Poseidon.

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“Let’s go to Camp Half-Blood and play capture the flag,” a smiling Riordan said from the stage, introducing the last of three exclusive sneak-peak clips from the series, which premieres December 20.

A capacity Comic Con audience — many already in orange and black Camp Half-Blood t-shirts handed out at the door — cheered inside the mammoth exhibition hall at Manhattan’s Javits Center. Then came a five-minute reel showing Percy, played by Walker Scobell, in a crucial early test of his fighting skills at the sleep-away camp for young demigods-in-training.

Fans also saw a clip of the first seven minutes of the premiere, which traces Percy’s story back to second grade, and then a harrowing chase sequence with Percy, his mother Sally (Virginia Kull), and friend Grover (Aryan Simhadri) trying to outrun the dreaded Minotaur in a beat-up subcompact.

The seven announced panelists were part of the creative team behind the camera, with showrunner-writers Jonathan E. Steinberg and Dan Shotz and the director of the two-episode premiere, James Bobin, fielding questions alongside production designer Dan Hannah, costume designer Tish Monaghan, and visual effects supervisors Erik Henry and Jeff White.

Steinberg immediately credited the close involvement of Riordan — at that point still secreted away someplace backstage — with bringing the series into being.

“It would be extraordinarily difficult to try to do it justice, to do it right, without the person who dreamed it, and I think without the person who really did the work to sell it, and to find this audience and this fan base,” Steinberg said.

Riordan was famously unenthusiastic about the movie versions of his book series, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013), although they have grossed nearly $430 million at the worldwide box office despite the author’s criticisms and a lukewarm reaction from devoted readers.

The book series, launched in 2005 with The Lightning Thief, saw its sixth installment, The Chalice of the Gods, published this month. They have sold more than 30 million copies in the U.S., and been translated into 42 languages while spawning graphic novels, short story collections, and a short-lived Broadway musical.

“We were so unbelievably fortunate to be able to partner with Rick and Becky,” Shotz said. Both showrunners and director Bobin said their own children have read and cherished Riordan’s books, which grew out of stories the author made up to entertain his dyslexic son after they read the original Greek mythologies together.

Season one takes a fresh run at The Lightning Thief tale, introducing Percy as a “troubled kid,” as the character himself puts it, with bad grades and school bullies on his case. Scobell’s Percy is a 12-year-old — unmistakably younger and more boyish than the movie version played by Logan Lerman — who struggles with dyslexia as well as unearthly visions that earn him a trip to a child therapist. He is only just becoming aware of his emerging powers. In one clip shown Sunday, Percy exacts a small, comical measure of payback against one of his boarding-school tormentors during a class trip to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An all-star cast including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Megan Mullally, Timothy Omundson, and the late Lance Reddick as Zeus — in one of his last performances — plays supporting roles behind the three young leads, Scobell, Simhadri and Leah Jeffries as Annabeth, daughter of the goddess Athena.

Steinberg said that the creative team approached casting of the young trio with an attitude of, “If it’s right, we’re going to know it the moment it walks in the door.”

“And the first time I saw Walker,” he said, “there was a little voice in my head that said, ‘I think that’s the kid.’ … And we got very lucky because we found it three times.”

The next challenge was bringing Percy’s world to life on-screen in a way — in studio settings and on location in Vancouver, Canada — that would resonate with the show’s young cast and its audience. VFX supervisor White said that many interiors — like the Met museum — were simulated using a giant virtual LED wall so that actors would have virtual surroundings to respond to instead of being stuck in a blue-screen “box.”

Monaghan, praising all the Camp Half-Blood t-shirt wearers in the audience, described the amount of trial and error that went into the characters’ on-screen camp tees.

“We tested something like 20 different shades of orange in pre-production, and we had to find a shade that would work outside under the sunlight, under a gray sky, in the forest, in an interior as well,” Monaghan said.

“And then we tried to go to the orange t-shirt store and that did not help,” she said to laughter. The costumers set up their own color-dyeing operation. “Basically almost like a witch’s cauldron,” she said.

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