As season 2 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians rolls out, one of the bigger concerns that fans continue to have is with the age of the actors. While Percy and Annabeth are 12-13 years old in The Sea of Monsters, Walker Scobell and Leah Sava Jeffries are already 16.
Fans are within their right to worry that the actors will look much older than their respective characters by the time the fourth and fifth books are adapted, especially if the show takes as long between future seasons as it did for the current one. It is a problem that has recently plagued shows like Stranger Things and Euphoria. The live-action show of Avatar: The Last Airbender is seemingly facing similar criticisms.
Fans should rest easy knowing that season 3 is already in the works after the series received an early renewal in March 2025. Filming started in August 2025, well before the release of season 2 in early December.
The characters being aged up was a major gripe for fans who watched the movies. Logan Lerman was 17 when he was cast as Percy Jackson. Alexandra Daddario, who played Annabeth Chase, was in her mid-twenties. Naturally, when young teens like Scobell, Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri (Grover) were cast for the series, fans were delighted.
Rick Riordan, the author of the series, who was shut out from the movies and now serves as an executive producer on the show, admitted in an interview with The Wrap that he did not anticipate certain factors beforehand.
“I think one thing I did not fully appreciate when we started this whole process is how long a season of television takes to produce, especially big television like this,” Riordan said. “I didn’t really fully appreciate all the challenges involved. I think I naively thought, ‘Yeah, we’ll hire the kids of the right age, and we’ll do a season a year, no problem.’ But you know, in reality, that’s very difficult to do for a number of reasons.”
However, the age factor, especially when it comes to Scobell, poses a certain threat to the very core of the story. In this week’s episode, we see Luke Castellan (Charlie Bushnell) mention “The Great Prophecy” to Percy and Annabeth, and the two of them later talk about it on their boat. It says that a demigod child of one of the “Big Three” (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) will determine the fate of Olympus.
In the fifth book, The Last Olympian, Percy turns 16 right before the Battle of Manhattan, which serves as the crux of the whole story. However, Riordan has a way around that makes sense.
“It doesn’t say in the prophecy it’s going to happen on a 16th birthday. It says he has to reach 16, and then…’ you know?” he said. “So I think we can fudge it a little bit on that angle, that ‘OK, congratulations, you made it to 16. Now, at some point after this, things are going to happen that are not going to be great.’ So we’re not tied to the 16th birthday, at least. I think that’s the only real thing that we’ve talked about as we look at season 3 that would make sense and help it seem a little more realistic.”
The actors are also on board with the aging up. Scobell believes the concerns are blown out of proportion, as he is still younger than Lerman was in the movies. Jeffries is glad that the dialogs do not sound “too babyish” this season, and their speech matches the gravity of the situations the characters find themselves in. Simhadri wants the show to “start feeling more and more mature,” and it is only fair to expect that an aged-up cast would deliver on that better.
New episodes of Percy Jackson and the Olympians come out every Wednesday on Disney+.