I’m so sorry to inform the Logan Lerman girlies that no, there will definitely be no cameo from our beloved OG Percy Jackson in the new Disney+ TV series adaptation Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Author Rick Riordan himself has made that clear.
Fans have been positively frothing at the mouth for even a simple cameo from Lerman in the series since it was first announced, with some calling for Lerman to be cast as Poseidon — even though, yes, he’s a bit young to be playing the father of 14-year-old Walker Scobell‘s new iteration of Percy Jackson.
We can now 100% confirm that will not be happening.
“We need to let the series be the series,” Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson books and executive producer of the new adaptation, told PEDESTRIAN.TV on Tuesday.
“We need to let it breathe, and not be literally overshadowed by anyone or anything from the movies.
“I know the movies had a lot of fans,” he continued, but said it was important for the series to be “its own thing”.
Rebecca Riordan, Rick’s wife and fellow executive producer of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, also reiterated that Logan Lerman himself had said he did not want to be cast in the series.
“Logan himself said, ‘I wouldn’t hire me. I wouldn’t hire me for this role or a role in here’, because it does, it needs to be its own thing,” she said.
The Percy Jackson fandom will undoubtedly be devastated at the news, given Lerman’s iconic performance in the film adaptations despite what an absolute train-wreck they were.
Don’t get me wrong, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief was a great movie — the Lotus Casino scene was iconique — but it was deeply inaccurate to the books.
It’s also not controversial to note that its sequel, The Sea of Monsters, was also a bit of a mess. In fact, only two Percy Jackson movies were released (out of five) before the adaptations were canned for good.
Rick Riordan distanced himself from the films at the time (he notoriously has never seen them and despised the script), and it’s not hard to see why.
However, I have a good feeling about this latest iteration of Percy Jackson. For one thing, Rick executively produced it and wrote the pilot.
While the series won’t be totally, 100%, completely accurate to the books — Rick told us that’s “impossible” given it’s an adaptation— it’ll have the same “spirit”.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians will premiere on Disney+ on December 20.
