Who better to answer questions about Percy Jackson and the Olympians than Rick Riordan? The author of the beloved book franchise (who has another Percy Jackson book coming out in September) is an executive producer, co-creator, and writer on the Disney+ series, making him the expert to turn to for burning questions.
Percy Jackson fans submitted questions for Riordan to TV Insider ahead of Season 1’s debut in December, and he happily answers them in the video above. Some of the topics on fans’ minds were creative process questions, like how he chooses names for his characters and creating new scenes for the show that weren’t in the book.
“Sometimes they just come to me,” Riordan says, above. “Like Percy Jackson [Walker Scobell]. Why Percy Jackson? Well, Percy is short for Perseus. But Jackson, why? I don’t know, it just sounded good!” As for the story’s heroine, Annabeth Chase (played by Leah Sava Jeffries), Riordan says he had “never known anyone, never heard the word Annabeth before. It just kind of came to me and it seemed like a really cool name.” As for Grover (Aryan Simhadri), that’s from a love of Sesame Street.
Riordan was an English and history teacher at middle schools for 15 year prior to the success of his novels (that tracks — he sounds like a teacher in this video!). Some characters in the books are named after former students and colleagues.
Charles Beckendorf and Travis and Connor Stoll are all book characters named after Riordan’s former students, and “the list goes on.” “Mrs. Dodds, who turns into the Fury, she’s a former colleague of mine who taught at my school,” he adds. “She kind of liked being a Fury because now all the kids are scared of her.”
Riordan also reveals his favorite episode from Season 1: the Episode 8 finale, “The Prophecy Comes True” (dropping on Tuesday, January 30 at 9/8c), as well as the scene he was most excited to adapt from The Lightning Thief book that was excluded from the movie.
While Riordan has made his dislike of the 2010 and 2013 film adaptations clear (he said “normalize bad movie erasure” when talking about the movies on social media during Season 1’s release), Riordan does address the movies briefly above — namely, his favorite scene scrapped from the movie that they got to create in Season 1.
Another treat for fans: the story behind Percy’s love of blue food! Find out all these answers and more in the full video interview above.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Season 1 Finale, Tuesday, January 30, 9/8c, Disney+
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
