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After recently making a successful acting debut in Netflix’s The Adam Project, Walker Scobell has officially landed his next major role in the upcoming Disney+ series adaptation of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians novel. The rising young actor has been tapped for the leading role of Percy Jackson, a character previously portrayed by Logan Lerman in the 20th Century Fox’s film adaptations.
Riordan also confirmed the news through his website, revealing that he and his wife Rebecca Riordan were the ones who told Scobell, who’s already a massive fan of the books, about his casting back on January 28 of this year. He also teased that Scobell has already done a number of chemistry reads with other candidates for the other two leading roles of Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood, whose casting are nearing finalizations.
“Walker Scobell is an incredibly talented young man who blew us away with his audition tapes for the role of Percy,” Riordan said. “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.”
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Percy Jackson and the Olympians series will be directed by James Bobin from a screenplay co-written by Riordan and Jon Steinberg (The Old Man), based on Riordan’s first installment of his hit Camp Half-Blood Chronicles book series.
“The live-action series tells the fantastical story of the titular 12-year-old modern demigod, Percy Jackson, who’s just coming to terms with his newfound supernatural powers when the sky god Zeus accuses him of stealing his master lightning bolt. Now Percy must trek across America to find it and restore order to Olympus,” reads the synopsis.
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Executive producers are Riordan, Bobin, Steinberg, Dan Shotz, Rebecca Riordan, Bert Salke, Monica Owusu-Breen, Jim Rowe, and Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Jeremy Bell, and D.J. Goldberg. 20th Television is set as the studio.
The Percy Jackson novel franchise began in 2005 with The Lightning Thief, which proved to be a smash hit and spawned four sequels, The Sea of Monsters, The Titan’s Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last Olympian, with five supplement books and graphic novel versions of each being released shortly after.
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