Walker Scobell may be the biggest Percy Jackson fan on the planet.
Since discovering the literary universe in the third grade, he has read the first five books of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians, the source material of a highly anticipated live-action adaptation that premieres Wednesday on Disney+, seven times. He’s amassed an enviable collection of memorabilia, including Percy’s armor and two of his swords. He even recently visited a local Hot Topic store to buy three more Camp Half-Blood t-shirts. But the 14-year-old actor, whose breakout role was Ryan Reynolds’ younger self in Netflix’s sci-fi action-comedy film The Adam Project, admits that there was a part of him that was not fully prepared to embody his character’s supernatural powers once the series moved from fantasy to his reality.
“There were a lot of wetsuits and gear to keep me cold from being wet, and I don’t think I understood how much I would be wet throughout the series,” Scobell, who was able to use his underwater training on the show to get his junior diver’s license, tells Teen Vogue with a laugh on a recent video call from his home in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I’m wet at some point in all the episodes, whether that’s from being underwater, from rain, from a puddle splashing on me, or from falling into a puddle on the ground.”
That comes with the territory of playing the scion of Poseidon (Toby Stephens), the Greek god of the sea. Adapted from The Lightning Thief, the first season of the faithful Percy Jackson adaptation follows the 12-year-old protagonist, having just found shelter at a training camp for other demigods, on a quest with his newfound best friends, Grover Underwood (Aryan Simhadri) and Annabeth Chase (Leah Sava Jeffries), to save his mortal mother (Virginia Kull) from Hades and the underworld and to find Zeus’ master lightning bolt before a war breaks out on Mount Olympus.
“Percy is just kind of a loose cannon at the beginning,” says Riordan, who serves as an executive producer on the new series with his wife, Becky. “He’s been thrown out of his normal world. He’s just learned that his dad’s a god. He doesn’t know which way’s up, but he’s trying to keep a sense of humor about it all. As viewers, we’re trying to figure this world out along with him.”
Scobell, in many ways, has grown up alongside his character. He was 12 when he first auditioned for Percy Jackson in January 2021, but it wasn’t until a year later that he learned, on a surprise Zoom call with the Riordans and other executive producers, that he had landed the role that would shoot him to Gen Z fame. In the nine months that it took to shoot the first season, he grew about six inches (from 5’1” to 5’7”). And in conversation nearly a year later, his voice has noticeably dropped an octave.
In Scobell, the producers found a young actor with the right combination of “comedic timing, sweetness, rebelliousness, snark and heroism” to embody the titular protagonist. “I think Walker’s sense of humor is even sharper and quicker than I write Percy,” Riordan says. “That makes him more Percy than my Percy. He’s perfect, in that regard.”
Having voraciously read all of the novels in the Percy Jackson universe, Scobell appreciates that Riordan and his creative team have found a way to ground each of the mythical characters in real-life, human conflict and to honor the wide-eyed qualities of his character, who feels a lot of righteous anger toward his estranged father. “This Percy is very close to the book Percy,” Scobell explains. “What sets him apart [from past iterations] is that he takes everything that happens to him into consideration more. It’s not like, ‘Oh, that just happened.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, why did that happen? Why hasn’t my dad talked to me before?’ He shows a lot more emotions when he’s fighting, and it all comes out.”
And while he may not be fighting gods or monsters in his own life, Scobell is the first to admit that he and Percy share a similar wit that will make him relatable to audiences of all ages. Percy “uses sarcasm to get himself through everything that he has going on in his life. I think that’s a really real way of coping with things,” Scobell says. “Throughout the whole series, I don’t think he necessarily ever figures out what’s really going on, which I think is pretty funny. The whole time, even at the end of the books, he’s never really understanding what’s going on. I think Annabeth has the biggest idea of what’s going on, but they don’t really know what they’re doing. It’s funny to see a bunch of 12-year-olds going around the whole world on a quest to find Zeus’ master bolt.”
That quest is, ultimately, what binds Percy, Grover and Annabeth together. Although the creative team spent over a year looking for the right actors to play the three leads, Riordan says the real challenge was to find three young people who could mesh well together. Scobell did in-person chemistry reads with around a dozen actors vying to play his best friends before the producers settled on Jeffries and Simhadri, with whom Scobell shares a similar on- and off-screen connection.
“A lot of times, me and Aryan will goof off, and Leah holds us together, which I think is very important, and it shows while we’re filming,” Scobell says with a half-mischievous smile. The actor credits the month of stunt training leading up to production last year in Vancouver for allowing him to build a closer connection with his costars, who echoed his sentiments in separate interviews. The trio once attempted to play ping pong with swords and now share numerous inside jokes, which have caused each other to break on camera. (A famous train sequence in episode 4 was particularly difficult for the three musketeers to shoot because they simply could not stop laughing.) “All of our real-life chemistry with each other is very similar to the show.”
But that is not to say that Scobell and his costars don’t understand the weight of responsibility that comes with being the new faces of such a beloved franchise. Scobell “loves his work, but he’s also very serious about the quality of his acting,” Riordan remarks. “He’s a perfectionist. He wants to make sure he got the best take.”
This is the third attempted adaptation of Percy Jackson — and, by all accounts, the most successful and well-received to date. Logan Lerman famously played the hero in two films, which Riordan has privately and openly criticized for its controversial creative changes, while Chris McCarrell played him in a Broadway and touring production of The Lightning Thief. Both Lerman and McCarrell have expressed their support for Scobell’s interpretation of Percy; Lerman, in a written message to host Josh Horowitz, recently said he “can’t imagine a better fit” for the role, while McCarrell essentially passed the baton to Scobell in a Tweet last year.
“I watched the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower on my way home from filming, and I really liked that, so I DM’d [Logan],” Scobell reveals. “It’s such a good movie, and I told him I thought it was great, and he said thank you. That’s the only interaction I’ve had with [Logan or Chris], but I really hope that I get to meet them both one day. It would be like the three Spider-Men! I’d love to get their views.”
“It’s a lot to put on the shoulders of any 12-year-old or 14-year-old to ask them to carry a show,” Riordan says of his cast. “What attracted me to them all was they all had this sort of consummate professionalism, as young as they are. One of our directors, Anders [Engström], worked with the kids for the first day, and he was so impressed. The director turned to me and said, ‘It is so nice to work with adults for a change,’ because these kids were just so, so great.”
Percy’s relationships with Grover and Annabeth hold a particularly special significance for the actors, who feel just as protective of the characters as the fans are. “Grover’s the first real friend Percy has ever had, the first person he can share his dreams with or what he sees and not be called crazy,” Scobell says. “Annabeth is also very important to keep him in line. In a weird way, Annabeth controls his ADHD. I know that might sound weird, but there’s so much going on, and Annabeth organizes it for him, even though she has it too.”
Longtime fans of Percy Jackson are particularly excited to see the development of the relationship between Percy and Annabeth, whose contentious relationship reaches a tipping point in the fifth episode, titled “Tunnel of Love,” Scobell teases. (That is also Scobell’s favorite episode of the season.) But is there another “Percabeth” moment from the books that Scobell is most looking forward to bringing to life? “I really like the moment in the fifth book, when he jumps into the river Styx, that moment where he’s underwater and Annabeth pulls him out, and he sees her in the surface,” Scobell responds. “I’m really excited to see how they do that, because there’s no way they don’t.”
Having worked around 150 of 160 days on the first season, Scobell says he was particularly excited to shoot the scene in which Percy fights Ares, the god of war and courage, which came toward the end of production. “I got to fight Adam Copeland, and I remember at one point of the fight, he picked me up with one hand, and he actually did that [on the day of shooting], which was terrifying. It was the coolest thing ever — but terrifying,” Scobell recalls, grinning from ear-to-ear.
While Disney+ has yet to order future seasons of Percy Jackson, Scobell — who is surprisingly and refreshingly laid-back about the prospect of fame changing his life in the coming months — already has his sights set on returning to Camp Half-Blood. “I think [adapting] the third book [The Titan’s Curse] is going to be super interesting,” Scobell says. “It’s very different. Annabeth isn’t there this time, unfortunately, which is the only downside, but I think it changes the trajectory of the show. It’s [set] in the winter this time, there are so many more characters, and I totally think that Christopher Judge should play Atlas, that’s what I’ll say.”
