The next big thing in Hollywood was created by a middle school teacher from Texas. To his fans he is Uncle Rick.
In the crowd at a Los Angeles theater where Uncle Rick stopped on his latest book tour, two teenage sisters rave about how they drove nearly two hours to get here tonight – longer if you factor in parking – but it was worth it. Like Percy Jackson, the character who made Uncle Rick famous, the older sister suffers from ADHD while the younger sister never enjoyed reading. And Percy also landed in Los Angeles on his very first mission. So, according to the logic laid out in Uncle Rick’s books, these girls were born heroes.
Peter Yang for Variety
“That’s what I think will happen,” whispers the 15-year-old. “He’ll pull me out of the audience and say, ‘I want you on my show.'” Her sister scans the room, taking stock of all the adult fans in attendance; They also grew up watching Uncle Rick’s work, and their excitement at seeing him surpasses that of the pubescents they’re sandwiched between. “He’s still alive,” the 17-year-old reasons, even though Rick is only 59, “and people still pay $60 a ticket to see him.”
Rick Riordan released 2005’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. The book introduces 12-year-old Percy as he discovers that the monsters and demon-eyed teachers that have plagued him his entire life are not figments of his imagination: He turns out to be a demigod – the child of a human woman and the water god Poseidon – and the Greek myths he learned as a child are real. To empower his son Haley, Riordan cited Percy’s ADHD and dyslexia as strengths: they came from his fighting instincts and his innate ability to read ancient Greek. Five books and 18 years later, Percy is a fully-fledged hero, whose story gets a definitive film adaptation when the TV series of the same name arrives on Disney+ on December 20th.
Between then and now, Riordan managed to quit his job as “Percy Jackson” grew into a full literary ecosystem. There are two sequel series narrated by other characters: “The Heroes of Olympus” and “The Trials of Apollo”, consisting of five books each, as well as companion books, graphic novels and, from September, new books in which Percy is the central character. That’s before we turn to Riordan’s separate series based on Egyptian and Norse mythologies, or Rick Riordan Presents, whose publishing imprint highlights other authors and folklore.
It’s hard to imagine that it took “Percy Jackson” nearly two decades to get “Harry Potter,” as Jon Steinberg, co-creator of the Disney+ series, puts it. Until you remember when 20th Century Fox tried to do just that.
According to screenwriter Craig Titley, after the huge box office success of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001, Hollywood studios began “buying up any book in which three kids hunt monsters.” Titley ended up writing “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” for Fox : The Lightning Thief” at the invitation of director Chris Columbus, who famously directed the first “Harry Potter” film.
Leah Sava Jeffries; age 14; hometown Detroit, Michigan; Jeffries’ credits include a six-episode episode of “Empire” and a role in the Idris Elba-directed thriller “Beast.” Peter Yang for Variety
“The problem,” says a source close to the production at the time, “was Tom Rothman.” The head of Sony Pictures, who was then co-chairman of 20th Century Fox, “was notorious for making films on the cheap. So if you go for Harry Potter, you’re automatically hindering the project.”
“Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” hit theaters in 2010 with a built-in audience of sorts — something Rothman took for granted, according to the source. “He believed that marketing could sell a well-known book series, so why spend the most money? But the special effects are bad. There’s not the edge that the books had.” And according to Titley, budget constraints led to some of the first book’s pivotal moments being extensively rewritten, angering fans.
Rothman declined to comment, but a senior source at Fox at the time claimed that Fox had never discussed replicating Harry Potter and that it would have been unwise to make “Percy Jackson” a Harry Potter-like given the $95 million Budget The studio’s expenses were enough to get the job done.
The film grossed $227 million at the box office – decent, but nowhere near the $976 million that “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” achieved on its $125 million budget. Fox eventually greenlit a sequel, and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Sea of Monsters grossed $202 million in 2013. Some insiders felt this killed any potential for a major franchise. However, the Fox source points out that Rothman left the company in 2012 and priorities simply began to shift. Anyway, the studio never bothered to adapt the final three books.
However, if you ask Uncle Rick, the problem was much bigger than just money.
“It’s refreshing that Uncle Rick hates the PJO movies even more than we do,” one fan wrote on Twitter in 2020. Uncle Rick wrote back: “Well, it’s a few hours of entertainment for you. For me, going through the meat grinder when I begged them not to do it is my life’s work.”
That’s what he pleaded, according to emails Riordan wrote to Fox in 2009. He published it on his blog in 2018 – almost 3,000 words, not including the 12 pages of script notes he supposedly included. In the emails, Riordan asks the studio to listen to him about how they could preserve the spirit of the book.
“After the film experience, I basically wrote off Hollywood for a long, long time,” Riordan says. “I didn’t really want to have anything to do with the film industry. For many years I said, “I don’t want to get involved.” I don’t want to think about other adjustments. I’m done.’ But when it became clear that something would happen to me or without me, I had a long chat with Becky, my wife. We said, ‘Well, if something were to happen, it’s probably best to try again.'”
That “something” was the Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019, which put the film rights to the “Percy Jackson” books in the hands of the Mouse House. For Riordan, the deal was both a cause for concern and “a glimmer of hope.”
Walker Scobell; age 14; hometown Erie, Pennsylvania; Before “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” Scobell got his big break starring alongside Ryan Reynolds in “The Adam Project.” He will soon be seen opposite Michael Douglas in “Blood Knot.” Peter Yang for Variety
It took “many meetings with many different executives and many different branches of the Disney corporation,” but the Riordans eventually signed on as executive producers of a new adaptation. Only this time, Riordan insisted that the project play live on the small screen. “I always felt that television was a better format for ‘Percy’ because it gave us a bigger canvas to tell more of the story,” says Riordan. “And to be more faithful to the source material, which is what fans of the books would really like to see.”
Now that Uncle Rick is involved, everything is different.
As he sips a cup of coffee from an artisan shop on the Vancouver set of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” — it’s January and there’s still a week left until production on the first season ends — Riordan says one of the “fundamental Mistakes” were made in them. What was special about the films was that the characters were older. Logan Lerman was 17 when he took on the role of Percy Jackson, while Percy’s friends Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood were played by 23-year-old Alexandra Daddario and 25-year-old Brandon T. Jackson.
“Now, after going through the production process, I completely understand why they did that. “It’s a lot easier to work with older actors,” admits Riordan. Still, “Once you have older teenagers, the dynamic is completely different. You lose so much of the wonder. A middle grader’s magic doesn’t work the same way. There’s a jaded teenage quality.”
Riordan’s eyes light up as he talks about finding the children who made up his trio: “They’re perfect, and they’ve only gotten more perfect.”
Walker Scobell, who starred alongside Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project, is only 14 years old. “He has this snarky attitude, but he’s also very sincere,” Riordan says. “Did I care that his hair was a different color than described in the book? Not at all. He just felt like Percy.”
And 17-year-old Aryan Simhadri plays Grover, whose character is technically a 24-year-old half-human, half-goat. But Satyrs age gracefully, and the books say he looks 16. “Does he look exactly like I describe him in the book?” No. It doesn’t matter,” Riordan says.
And then there’s Leah Sava Jeffries, the 14-year-old who plays Annabeth, the daughter of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Riordan gives her the most detailed praise: “Leah impressed me from the first moment I met her. She has the kind of steel that makes her a leader, but she also has a certain vulnerability.” He adds, “Again, does she look like Annabeth looks in the books? No. Was that important to me? No. If anything, expanding the cast in terms of representation has been a huge benefit.”
If Riordan sounds defensive about his casting, it’s because he was forced to. Even in a mythological universe made up of bull-headed giants and three-headed dogs, fandom is a beast unto itself. In 2010, fans took issue with the fact that Daddario was a brunette, as opposed to the blonde Annabeth described in The Lightning Thief. So it wasn’t a complete surprise that all hell broke loose when self-proclaimed purists learned that Scobell was blonde, Simhadri was Indian and Jeffries was black. And not the kind overseen by Hades.
Aryan Simhadri; age 17; hometown Orange County, California; Simhadri has starred in Disney projects such as the 2022 remake of Cheaper by the Dozen and the coming-of-age film Spin. “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is his first series regular role. Peter Yang for Variety
Ugly sentiments poured out from the darkest corners of the internet when Jeffries’ casting alongside Simhadri’s was announced in spring 2022. Less than a week later, Riordan took to the blog, through which he has communicated with fans since 2005, to say, “If you have a problem with this casting, reach out to me.”
In the post, he condemns assumptions that he must have been “coerced, brainwashed, bribed and threatened” to choose a black actor for the role, and remains adamant that Jeffries and her castmates “used their audition to to expand, improve and electrify the lines”. They were given.” And he doesn’t hesitate to describe the backlash as racist several times before declaring that racism is an evil that everyone, including himself, must unlearn.
“We knew it would be a problem once we knew she was the one,” Riordan says of Jeffries. His job as a middle school teacher is still the core of his identity, he says, and the cast of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is just another class of students. More important than television, Riordan’s priority is “to protect them, promote their education and do whatever I can to be a mentor and hopefully even a friend to them.”
As Riordan points out, it helps that Jeffries is wise beyond her years. “It got to me in the quickest second possible — literally 90 seconds,” Jeffries says of the debacle. “But I know that no matter how many people say bad things, it will never be true.” She adds: “That sounds really strange, but I don’t blame them – these people may not know how to adapt should. Me? No matter who they put in it, I would love it either way. Because it’s just a show; It’s not like I fired anyone.”
Leah Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri and Walker Scobell in “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” Disney
Jeffries enjoyed the opportunity to explore what it means to be a Black Annabeth. Andrew McIlroy, who worked as an acting coach on the set, printed out hundreds of pictures of Greek characters and asked the actors to capture the images that touched them. “Leah said, ‘None of these people look like me,'” McIlroy recalls. So in her next session he brought her a picture of a dark-skinned woman with long black hair and flames in her eye sockets, wearing an intricate gold crown. “She said yes. This is Athena. This is my mother.'”
From then on, the children had the freedom to have fun on set.
“There is a lot to do here in Vancouver. We go on hikes and that counts as school!” Scobell says. “Instead of going back to the classroom and doing math, sometimes the camera people teach me about the lenses and let me try on the Steadicam harness, and that counts as school too.”
For Jeffries, the highlight of the show was its creator. “I love working with Mr. Rick. When he comes in the door, even though we’re not related, she says, ‘Hello, Grandpa!'” she says as Simhadri nods vigorously. She also remembers McIlroy: “He lets us throw these balls at each other either super hard – I promise you, we won’t hurt each other – or very gently. He’d have us scream a line that was supposed to be whispered, or one time he had me sing really high notes like Mariah Carey. That way we don’t get too used to how we say it.”
Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Disney
Simhadri is three years older than his comrades and wears his seniority well. When interviewed alongside Jeffries, he encourages her to speak first and gratefully leads with his own answers, even if he can’t help but crack jokes. He explains why he preferred filming a scene in which Grover meets other satyrs: “They all wore prosthetics, like me. It was cool to know that other people had to feel what I felt. Not that it was a bad feeling!”
The first time the children get together again after production wraps is four months later, for a photo shoot in Los Angeles, where they immediately fall back into their giggly rhythm. The boys play the “Rocky” theme over the speakers more than once – Simhadri explains that they “discovered” the films together in Vancouver. When it’s Jeffries’ turn to play a few solos, she takes cues from songs by SZA and Rihanna. Scobell sticks his middle finger up at the camera every time his mother isn’t looking, while Simhadri roars with laughter and Jeffries rolls his eyes and grins.
It’s as normal a childhood as you could hope for when you choose to grow up on a big-budget Disney set.
“I’m superstitious,” Uncle Rick admits. “I don’t think I really felt like the show was going to happen until we got the green light” – which came in January 2022, after about 18 months of development.
However, Disney executives couldn’t have been more optimistic. “The North Star in the development process was to honor the books and Rick’s vision,” says Karey Burke, president of Disney’s 20th Television. “And secondly, seeing the show live alongside the worlds created by our sister studios Lucasfilm and Marvel. We really wanted to spare no expense to make sure this series felt just as big and imaginative.”
Sources say the budget for “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is between $12 million and $15 million per episode, which would put it on par with “The Mandalorian,” the Pedro Pascal-led “Star Wars” series that 2019 on Disney+ premiered in 2019. (Disney declined to confirm these numbers.)
As with any streaming series, subscriber growth will be an important consideration for continued investment in “Percy Jackson.” This is Disney’s first chance to launch an entirely new franchise on its streamer, as the most popular titles on Disney+ currently come from franchises that predate the platform.
“But honestly, the first indicator will be the reaction of Rick’s core fans,” says Ayo Davis, president of Disney Branded Television. “We need to understand how it is received.”
Walker Scobell as Perseus “Percy” Jackson in “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” Disney
Fandom is a lucrative and prescient force in Hollywood, and that may be especially true in this scenario. “Percy Jackson” has something that “Star Wars,” the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and “Harry Potter” all lack: Uncle Rick. In other words, there is a direct and constant online communication channel between creators and consumers. Rick uses his blog to ask fans for feedback, they post their thoughts on social media, he reads their messages, and the cycle repeats. From a business perspective, this relationship is invaluable.
“This is the first time I’ve been in a development process that involves fans,” says Dan Shotz, who co-helms “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” as showrunner and executive producer with Steinberg. “We wanted to protect the things that fans couldn’t see in the movies and wanted to experience in the books. At the same time, we have to separate it from that and say, ‘Why is this a story we want to tell?'” To answer that question, the writers had to make some changes to the story, which can be tricky.
“I think it would have been more difficult if Rick hadn’t been the partner that he was,” says Steinberg, “in the sense that we would have to come to terms with the idea that we might have to break everything to make it somehow Putting it back together again feels right.”
For example, to further push the innate inclusivity of the “Percy Jackson” universe, which mythologizes neurodivergence and canonically features queer characters, Shotz and Steinberg wanted to explore disability. “Chiron is in a wheelchair in the story,” Shotz says of Glynn Turman’s character, whose chair in the books serves to hide his equine body. “In tradition, centaurs were warriors. In our Chiron, the horse has a brace on his leg, a war injury, so his disability is not just a camouflage. We’ll deal with that in the future of the series. We don’t even get into it in the first season. At the moment it’s just a detail.”
Aryan Simhadri as Grover Underwood in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Disney
If all goes according to plan, the writers will have plenty of options for when and where to explore Chiron’s backstory.
“We want them all,” Burke says of the 11 books Riordan has published beyond the original five in the “Percy Jackson” universe. “Despite his previous film experience, he is a broad-minded thinker about his work. He doesn’t have a rigid interpretation of it. The other series he created that live in this world are all part of our universe that we can adapt.”
As for considerations at other levels of Disney, such as merchandising and theme park potential, Burke smiles. “I have to say that there is incredible support for ‘Percy’ at Walt Disney Co.,” she says, noting that Disneyland already gives out “Percy Jackson”-branded candy bags for Halloween. “But Percy Jackson World in Disney World! I want the Imagineers to be there now.”
Riordan, for his part, tries to focus on the task at hand. “If nothing else happened other than these five seasons, I would be happy,” he says with a contented sigh. After all, this is Uncle Rick we’re dealing with.
He laughs at the nickname. “The older I get, the stranger it seems to me. If you want to call me that, fine, but I won’t put that on my business card.” He then continues: “But it’s an honor. Yesterday someone told me that I am a father figure to many children in the world. That’s a big responsibility. And I’ll try not to let them down.”
Before the SAG-AFTRA strike began, interviews were conducted with Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri.
Stylist: Alison Brooks/Exclusive Artists Management; Stylist assistant: Lena Barker; Care (Simhadri & Scobell): Ayae Yamamoto/Exclusive Artists Using Oribe Haircare; Grooming (Jeffries): Caitlin Krenz/Exclusive Artists with Kosas and Mizani;
Main image: Scobells Pants: H&M; Sweater: Obey; Sneakers: Nike; Simhadri’s jacket: Rag & Bone; T-shirt: Zara; Pants: Sandro; Sneakers: Converse; Jeffries’ tip: ALC; Skirt: Molly Goddard; Shoes: Gucci; Cover photo; Scobell’s T-Shirt: All Saints; Jacket; Asos; Jeans: Rag and Bone; Sneakers: Nike; Simhadri’s T-shirt: Robert Barakett; Jacket and pants: Topman; Shoes: Converse; Jeffries’ top: Alexander Wang; Skirt: Aliétte; Shoes: Gucci; Jeffries Single: Above: Alexander Wang; Skirt: Aliétte; Shoes: Gucci; Scobell Single: T-Shirt: All Saints; Jacket; Asos; Jeans: Rag and Bone; Sneakers: Nike; Simhadri Single: T-Shirt: Robert Barakett; Jacket and pants: Topman; Shoes: Converse