‘Percy Jackson & the Olympians’ star Leah Sava Jeffries on tackling the beloved series: ‘It’s a great journey’
TheGrio.com caught up with Jeffries and the other two leads of the highly anticipated TV adaptation of author Rick Riordan's best-sellers, which comes to Disney+ this month.
“Percy Jackson & the Olympians” is finally getting its small-screen moment. The beloved book series is getting the television adaptation treatment courtesy of series author Rick Riordan and Disney+, who’ll be taking viewers into the world of Greek gods, memorable monsters and Camp Half-Blood.
TheGrio.com caught up with the three series leads, including Leah Sava Jeffries, who takes on one of the biggest characters in the popular franchise: Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena.
While Riordan’s successful “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” book series enjoyed relatively successful film adaptations in 2010 and 2013, the author (and the series’ legions of fans) have been vocal about the outcome of those films, specifically in how they fail to adhere to the source material very well. With the new series, in which Riordan is thoroughly involved and part of the creative team, Percy Jackson fans get a chance to finally see their story get done right.
Leading the new series are relative newcomers Walker Scobell as the titular hero, Aryan Simhadri as his best friend and satyr Grover, and Jeffries as Jackson’s other comrade and eventual love interest.
The first season of the Disney+ TV series sticks to the first book in the collection, “The Lightning Thief,” in which Jackson discovers he is a demigod, a half-mortal-half-god son of Poseidon. After getting accused of stealing one of Zeus’ master lightning bolts, Jackson, along with his two friends, go on an epic quest to find the bolt and prove their worth to the gods.
“It’s a great journey,” Jeffries told theGrio.com. “I wanted to make sure that Annabeth’s presence was still there. I wanted to make sure that, you know, I kept the same perspective as Mr. Rick wrote it in the book. This series means a lot to him, and I wanted to make sure that this show came out as best as it can possibly be.”
“It’s such an honor playing these roles,” she added. “This is just the beginning of Percy Jackson, but its also a new start of it … we’re bringing something back, obviously, and I want to make sure that it stays the same but in the greatest way possible.”
“There’s a lot of pressure when you’re adapting such an iconic character from such an iconic series … as fans of the books we also want to watch, we want to put something out there that we are proud of,” Simhadri said. “I’m glad to say that I think we did.”
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Scobell spoke to how Riordan let the actors bring themselves to the roles. “I think when we got there, Rick kind of broke those expectations,” he shared, “and kind of let us go off and make the best versions of those characters.”
The first two episodes of “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” premiere on Wednesday, Dec. 20, on Disney+, with the first episode also streaming on Hulu.
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