New worlds? Percy is ready for them; so is Walker

The notion might seem overwhelming: A regular lad is whisked away to a special place, where he must do big things.
That happened to Harry Potter … And to Percy Jackson, the centerpiece of an epic series that starts Wednesday (Dec. 20) on Disney+ … And, sort of, to the actors playing them.
To Walker Scobell (shown here), who stars as Percy, such changes are a natural part of life. He grew up in a military family, accustomed to new schools and new lives.
“I think that helped with being an actor in general,” he said at a virtual press conference. “My dad is so used to moving a lot and our whole family is. So it wasn’t a big change.”
Other actors – from Faye Dunaway and Jessica Alba to Michael J. Fox and the Mowry twins – have had similar backgrounds: Military kids can be perpetual newcomers. They learn to be outgoing; they’re ready for a life of endless auditions and film sets.
Percy’s life is like that, too – only bigger. Suddenly, he’s facing gods and monsters.
His solution is sometimes to joke about it, which Scobell, 14, can relate to. “I have a very similar sense of humor,” he said.
His colleagues agreed. Aryan Simhadri, who co-stars as Grover, calls him “very rebellious”; Dan Shotz, a producer, prefers “mischievous.”
On the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” set, mischief was possible. There was an abundance of young actors, something the stars weren’t used to.
Leah Jeffries, 14, (who plays Annabeth) was 5 when she did “Empire” episodes, playing someone Lucious thought might be his granddaughter. She’s used to calling her colleagues “Mr.”; one day, she said “Mr. Aryan” to Simhadri, who’s only three years older. “I didn’t talk to him for six hours, I was so embarrassed.”
The actors don’t match the ethnicity of the characters in the books. (Jeffries is Black; Simhadri is South Asian.) But they apparently matched the personalities. “Mr. Rick told us to be ourselves when we filmed this,” Jeffries said.
That’s Rick Riordan, a former teacher whose first Percy Jackson novel came out in 2005, telling of a 12-year-old suddenly thrown into the world of the gods. Four sequels followed; in all, his books (with or without Percy) have topped 30 million sales.
But when a “Percy Jackson” movie came in 2010, fans grumbled. Percy was older (16, not 12, played by an 18-year-old) and the special effects were considered cheap.
After another movie in 2013, the project seemed to die. But then Disney gained the film rights when it bought the Twentieth Century Fox film studio.
Things re-started, this time with a bigger budget, younger stars and more room – eight episodes in the first season, with two on Dec. 20 and the rest arriving weekly.
And this time, Riordan was involved in the writing and producing. “It’s a constant balancing act between a real reverence for the material and a willingness to try something new,” said Jonathan Steinberg, who co-created this version.
Riordan was ready for changes, Shotz said. “Rick wrote this 20 years ago and he had some distance from it. So it was exciting to hear what new things he wanted to do.”