After an impressive turn as young Ryan Reynolds in hit time-travelling Netflix film The Adam Project, Walker Scobell has landed his next role, and it’s a biggie – he’ll play demigod Percy Jackson in the new Disney+ series adaptation of author Rick Riordan’s best-selling novels, titled Percy Jackson And The Olympians.
We’ve previously seen Percy in two feature film versions of the story, with Logan Lerman as the title character. Those adaptations made some significant story changes to the novels, though, one of the biggest being that the main characters were older than originally written – this new Disney+ series is going back to the text in that regard by casting 13-year-old Scobell. The series will follow Percy as he’s first learning about his supernatural powers, before being accused by sky god Zeus of stealing his master’s lightning bolt. Percy then sets out on a journey across America to find the lightning bolt and restore order to Olympus.
Percy is described as a smart and compassionate character, with a sharp sense of humour – mastering that Reynolds-ian style of comedy for The Adam Project will have been perfect preparation – and a bit of an outsider. The news of Scobell’s casting was announced by author Riordan (also an executive producer of the series and co-writer of the pilot episode) on his website, along with the following statement: “Walker Scobell is an incredibly talented young man who blew us away with his audition tapes for the role of Percy. Many of you recently discovered how great Walker is when you watched his movie The Adam Project, in which Walker lit up the screen as a younger version of Ryan Reynolds’ character. We were fortunate enough to audition Walker months before that movie came out, but the film only confirmed what we already knew about his talent. It was obvious to me and the rest of the team that Walker had the perfect mix of comedic timing, sweetness, rebelliousness, snark and heroism to embody our hero Percy Jackson.”
Production on the Percy Jackson And The Olympians series is set to begin this summer.