Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians Fills Out Its Central Trio

Just a few weeks ago, Disney+ announced that Walker Scobell (The Adam Project) would play the leading role of Percy Jackson in its upcoming series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Now, the series has cast Leah Sava Jeffries (Empire, Rel) and Aryan Simhadri (Disney+’s Cheaper by the Dozen) as Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood, Percy’s closest friends.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is an adaptation of the Percy Jackson middle grade book series by Rick Riordan. The five-books series follows Percy, a typical twelve-year-old who has dyslexia, a seemingly ordinary boy who discovers that he is a demigod, his mother a human and his father a god. In The Lightning Thief, book one in the series, on which the first season of the show will be based, finds Percy in Camp Half-Blood, a training camp for demigods like him. While there, he is accused of stealing Zeus’s lightning bolt, sending him on a wild journey to clear his name. His new friends Annabeth, a daughter of Athena, and Grover, a satyr (half-goat, half-human forest spirit) join him on the dangerous quest and together they discover much bigger dangers on the horizon.

This is not the series’ first adaptation. A movie adaption of the first book was released in February 12, 2010, with the second book following on August 7, 2013. The two movies made a combined $426 million at the box office worldwide. Where the movies aged up the main characters, perhaps to appeal to a broader audience, the tv series aims to be more true to the books and feature younger characters, as the casting demonstrates.

Disney+ officially announced that it had picked up the series on January 25, 2022. Filming is expected to begin this summer.

Photo: The cast of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (L-R) Leah Sava Jeffries, Walker Scobell, and Aryan Simhadri. Courtesy of Disney