00:00It's a lot of hard work.
00:02I know it all sounds super fun, and it is super fun,
00:06but you kind of have to fall in love with the process.
00:09You can't just love the glamorous parts.
00:12Hi, I'm Walker Scobell, and this is
00:13how I became Percy Jackson and Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
00:25I first started reading Percy Jackson when I was in third grade.
00:29I've read it seven times since then, the first five books.
00:32I was obsessed with it because I was born in Virginia Beach Hospital.
00:36There's a giant Poseidon statue near the beach,
00:39and I used to print out a picture, and I'd bring it to school
00:42to show people and tell them, like, this is proof
00:45that I'm Percy Jackson.
00:46I was filming The Atom Project, and I got
00:50an audition for Percy Jackson.
00:52My sister, she played Nancy Wilberfett.
00:56And my little brother played the teacher, Mrs. Dodds.
00:59And to get into character, he put, like, my mom's high heels on,
01:03and he talked in a really high-pitched voice.
01:05And so you can, like, see me kind of cracking up in my audition.
01:09It took, like, maybe, like, 30 or 40 takes.
01:12And I have no idea how I got it, but I don't think it really, like,
01:14set in until I got there, until I was filming it,
01:17until, like, I was on camera and people were calling me Percy.
01:24I did watch the Percy Jackson movies.
01:26When I was a kid, I loved them.
01:28I still do.
01:29I definitely think that my Percy Jackson is closer to the books
01:33than the movies were.
01:34I think a big part of that is Percy's age.
01:37He's 12 years old.
01:38I think it's very easy to forget.
01:40But I think it was very interesting to kind of explore the fact
01:44that they're still children.
01:46Mr. Jackson, you will learn to control yourself.
01:50Do you understand me?
01:51Me?
01:51Do you understand me?
01:53He can't help it, Mrs. Dodds.
01:55Percy's special.
01:57Meeting Rick, I met him in my final kind of audition
02:02when they told me I got the part.
02:03I didn't know he was going to show up.
02:05I wore my Camp Half-Blood T-shirt that I got in third grade.
02:08I was freaking out.
02:10And so the second time I met him, I was a lot more calm and collected
02:13so I could actually talk to him.
02:15He's given me a lot of tips and tricks for playing Percy.
02:19The biggest thing was just to relax.
02:22He told me that he loved how we were playing the characters
02:25and that we were doing great so far, which kind of like set me in.
02:29And this was at the beginning, so it kind of made me relax a bit more
02:34and made me kind of lock in.
02:39We did a full month of just training and rehearsing scenes.
02:44I did a lot of underwater training and like sword fight training
02:48with the stunts team.
02:50We practiced wires a lot.
02:51I did this scene where I'm falling.
02:53It's like an overhead shot of me falling down.
02:56The chimera sequence when I fall off the arch in St. Louis.
03:00So I was on wires and I was falling down.
03:03So we practiced that a couple times.
03:05We did a bunch of wire work and sword fighting stuff.
03:11Normal day on set.
03:12I wake up at like 7.30.
03:15Me and my dad or mom, we drive over to set and I get there around 8.30.
03:20I would get into my wardrobe, my clothes and my sides would be in my trailer.
03:26So I go over my sides, see what I'm doing that day.
03:30And then I go into, I think hair first.
03:33I'll get my hair done if it was a day where I was going to be wet all day.
03:37They would put this like slime in my hair to make it appear wet for the whole day,
03:42which felt really weird, especially when they like wash it out.
03:46And normally they just make me probably like three times more tan
03:51because I reflect light on the volume stage.
03:54And sometimes like there's a scene where I'm like deathly pale
04:00and I have like these like red kind of, it's red all over my eyes
04:04and look like I'm about to die.
04:06And what I find so funny about watching that scene
04:09is that that day they decided not to put any makeup on me other than the redness.
04:15So like the deathly pale you see, that's just my normal like conflection.
04:20And then I go out to film, we go rehearse maybe like 9 o'clock, 9.30.
04:28And then I go to school for like 30 minutes until they set up the shot.
04:31And we just go back and forth, shooting, school, shooting, school.
04:38And then at the end of the day, I head to my trailer, like wash all my makeup off,
04:42take my clothes off, put new clothes on. I don't just take them off.
04:45Yeah, and then I head home and go to bed or play video games.
04:48The first day on set, we were shooting at the Met on the volume stage.
04:51I keep saying I film all these weird places, but the whole time it's on the volume stage.
04:56Just the scene where it was me and Arian are talking, we do this bit where we both have sandwiches
05:00and I would take his meat off his sandwich and he would take my cheese.
05:04And that took like a week of training.
05:06That was the first scene. I was definitely a bit nervous.
05:09Going back and watching it, it's super hard to watch that scene specifically.
05:14I think like as the show goes on, like each episode, it kind of gets easier to watch
05:17because it's like closer to now. But that first scene, it's like impossible for me and Arian to watch
05:23because that was our first day like ever filming together.
05:27I think the hardest stunt sequence was the Minotaur fight.
05:31Not only because it was just like I was fighting like a bull that doesn't exist.
05:37I think one of the most difficult parts was that it was like pouring rain and it was dark.
05:42So I couldn't really see what was going on. And a lot of like my notes for camera were to
05:47open my eyes more,
05:48which is really hard when it's like, when there's rain coming in your eyes.
05:51There was a couple of different ways we shot the Minotaur sequence.
05:56One was there's this like really, really tall, like seven foot guy.
06:00And he was in the full skin-tight gray mo-cap suit holding a Minotaur head.
06:06So it was a lot less intimidating than you think it would be.
06:10So there was that when I was fighting him with like the sword.
06:12And then when I crawl onto his back, they shot that in a very interesting way.
06:17So they made a mock-up of the Minotaur, like without arms and from like the waist up.
06:23So I was on a wire and I'd sprint and they had like a little bit of fur so I
06:28could grab onto it.
06:29I'd sprint around him and then I'd jump, grab onto the back and then I'd get on his head.
06:34And they did a full sequence of me ripping the horn off and stabbing him in the head.
06:38That took like maybe three days to shoot. It was a long sequence.
06:42I was wearing a wool sweater while we were filming the Minotaur sequence, kind of like this.
06:48But it was like real, like sheep wool.
06:51And so when it would rain, there was a very, very terrible stench coming from my sweater.
06:58And it kept getting like loose because I was running around, it was pouring rain, it got heavy.
07:03And they would like constantly change that out and then dry.
07:07And we had two sweaters, I think. They'd just rotate them.
07:10And so that took a while. Sometimes we had to pause the scene so we could let the sweater dry
07:15out.
07:15And also like Camp Afflewood fight.
07:17I think that scene might have been like the hardest technically to film because we're like running in sand.
07:23There's three of them. There's Dior and then two of her cabin siblings.
07:27And so for every one move they did, I had to do three.
07:30And so I was running backwards on like this rocky sand doing this amazing sword fight.
07:38While we were filming that, I did not expect Dior to scream that loud.
07:44And if you look at my face, I'm not acting. I was genuinely terrified she was going to hit me.
07:49I love Dior. She's the sweetest person ever, but she's terrifying, which I think is perfect for Clarice.
07:55People listen closer when you talk. They work harder to be your friend.
08:00I've never had like an actual friend group that I've been super connected to until I found acting and I
08:09started Percy Jackson.
08:10And now I have like Leah and Charlie and Dior and Arian, of course, all these people that I feel
08:17like know how I'm feeling.
08:22One of my favorite parts about Percy is that, and something that I hope fans take away from it, is
08:29that there's a place for everyone.
08:31There's always somebody that knows what you're going through.
08:33With Percy specifically, like how many things happened to him and how stressful his life is, he's never lost like
08:40confidence or hope.
08:42He's never lost his sense of humor, which I think is a really important lesson in real life.
08:47It's not a trick for him.
08:48It's not a trick for him.
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