To get ready for our adventure into the Sea of Monsters, I spoke with Percy Jackson and the Olympians author/co-creator/executive producer Rick Riordan, along with cast members Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri, Charlie Bushnell, Dior Goodjohn, and Daniel Diemer. We talked all about the second season, which premieres December 10 with the first two episodes on Disney+ and Hulu.

In the new season, Percy Jackson returns to Camp Half-Blood one year later to find his world turned upside down. His friendship with Annabeth is changing, he learns he has a cyclops for a brother, Grover has gone missing, and camp is under siege from the forces of Kronos. Percy’s journey to set things right will take him off the map and into the deadly Sea of Monsters, where a secret fate awaits the son of Poseidon.

While the books were written from Percy’s point of view, the show isn’t. This change allows for the story to be expanded and all of our other favorite characters to get more screentime and growth. With that, we also get new character dynamics, such as a scene when Grover and Clarisse have to try to work together that Riordan described as “hilarious” and “so good.”

He continued to say, “I think you could just pick any two characters and throw them together, and that would be interesting to me. I would love to see that done. Which ones that might be, at what point, I don’t know. I mean, I can tell you that there are already some happening in season three. I can’t spoil too much, but you’re going to see more of the characters along with our new friends, Nico and Bianca di Angelo, who are incredible actors too, and just the dynamics of all of them is really, really fun to see.”

Meanwhile, Grover and Clarisse are on individual quests. “It can be very easy to forget that he’s on his own quest for Pan, and it can be easy for it to get neglected simply because he’s not on that quest at the moment [in season one]. He’s not physically out there venturing, and this season, he is,” Simhadri explained. “He has all these moments that serve as connective tissue between him, his quest, and Pan, you know, the Golden Fleece, all of the satyr kind of relics that he encounters in the season, these remnants of Pan. I think it’s just incredible that they were able to include all of that, and I don’t think this is a spoiler, I think it’s in the trailer, but I get my panpipes this season, which is awesome. And yeah, it’s nice to be able to kind of not have to put that to the side.”

“She’s in this position where she got on the ship and was like, ‘I’m going to lead like my father, that’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s how I’m going to get the glory. That’s how I’m going to succeed and make my family proud.’ Then, she tries, and it really backfires very, very hard,” Goodjohn told me. “She has this moment where she makes a switch, and she can choose to either allow this to eat her alive and die at sea, or try to be like her dad and fail, or she could really just say, ‘You know what? Whatever,’ and just go for something different and finally trust her instincts, actually, for once, because she has nothing left to lose anymore. So, I think it’s less about what it says about her as a female leader, because we don’t know that yet at that point, but it’s more so about the fact that she’s decided to finally trust herself, and that sparks everything that we’re going to come to learn about her.”

At one point, Percy points out how his track record at surviving impossible odds is pretty good, so I wanted to ask Scobell what felt impossible to him when he first started acting that this character helped him achieve.

“I don’t think this seemed impossible to me, but it seemed really far away, and I think it came really quickly. I’ve always loved the Avengers, I loved Marvel, I loved superheroes and stuff like that, and I love those huge fights they do, and I thought, ‘I’d love to do [that], that’s a dream, but it’s so far away,’ you know what I mean? I expected it to happen way further in the future, but it kind of just immediately started happening,” the actor shared. “I didn’t think I’d get to have a lot of fight scenes, but Percy Jackson happened, and then I had a lot of them.”

As with any adaptation, audiences like to believe they have a basic understanding of where the plot is going based on what they’ve read. So how do the actors avoid thinking six steps ahead to ensure that they stay present with the material they’re filming? “It’s funny because no matter how much I read ahead, it won’t stick in my head. So I have to say it now, I’ve been trying to act like, oh man, I got this, but it genuinely leaves my head,” Jeffries revealed. “I’m going to be present because I have no choice. So I do know what’s ahead, but somehow five minutes later, it gets erased. Some things stick, some things don’t, but what I’m saying is that, basically, it’s not that big of a challenge because I’m kind of figuring out the things as we go.”

This season, we’re introduced to Tyson, Percy’s cyclops half-brother. “It resonated enough that when I got the audition, it felt like I was just going back home to a character that I already knew,” Diemer expressed. “It was, I think, surprising to me how layered the complexity of emotion that we were allowed and able to kind of go into while still maintaining the kind of feeling of Tyson throughout the process. I think I was worried that within the more action packed sequences where Tyson has to become more of a protector and a little bit more ferocious, that it would feel like two different characters, and I think that was something that I was really concerned about because I wanted to make sure that this innocence and the purity that he also has is also able to still shine through. I think we found a really, really good balance where you see these different sides to him without it feeling like it’s two separate characters, where it feels like there’s a through line throughout the whole season. So by the end, I was just really excited with kind of the overall Tyson that we managed to create as a team and made me really, really excited for kind of everything moving forward.”

Additionally, we are given some insight into Luke, Thalia, and Annabeth’s time together through flashbacks. Tamara Smart is taking on the role of Thalia Grace, and we see Bushnell play a younger version of his character, while young Annabeth is portrayed by Jeffries’ real-life cousin, Marissa Winans.

“It was so great to be able to explore that and actually live in that for a minute, because I think it’s one thing to hear about the time with Luke, Thalia, and Annabeth on the road, but to actually see it is another thing,” Bushnell commented. “I remember before we started filming all that stuff, Andrew, our acting coach, he showed up outside of my building and was like, ‘Meet me downstairs.’ It was a Sunday, at like, I don’t know, noon or something, and then, he just had a hoodie and a beanie, and he basically just made me walk around the city in this. He gave me like four bucks, and then, he was like, ‘Okay, you’ve got to go get food for Thalia and Annabeth. Remember there’s monsters around, you’re looking over your shoulder.’ So I was acting as young Luke. It was more about getting young Luke’s physicality, but I went into McDonald’s, I was like, ‘What’s your cheapest burger?’ I cut it up into three slices. Yeah, it was cool. It was a fun experience.”

Season two is based on The Sea of Monsters, the second installment of Disney Hyperion’s best-selling book series, written by Riordan. Percy Jackson and the Olympians has already been renewed for a third season.

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