EXCLUSIVE: Executive Producers Jon Steinberg, Dan Shotz and Craig Silverstein Dive Into Season 2 of ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’

Disney+ kicked off the second season of their hit series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, today, December 10. Based off the second novel, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monster, in the best selling series, by Rick Riordan, BeautifulBallad had the opportunity to chat with executive producers, Jon Steinberg, Dan Shotz, and Craig Silverstein.

On the shift in the visual color palette from season one to season two: My question is, visually, Season 1 felt very warm and golden like typical Greek mythology, but Season 2 feels distinctly cooler, bluer, and sharper. (00:00:37) Was this color palette shift purely because of the ocean setting or was it a deliberate storytelling choice to signal that the golden age of the camp is dying?

Craig Silverstein: “I think we go through a few different palettes, though—you haven’t seen all of the colors yet.”

Dan Shotz: “There’s some stuff that we obviously think about, the color palette and the places that we go. Camp feels like Camp, but then there are shifts in the story as the stakes are getting so much greater. As you them enter the Sea of Monsters and as it continues on, we do make each place that they go and each person or monster that they face, each one of them has kind of a very distinct look and feel, and the benefit of being able to do a series that has all of these different chapters in it. We were able to really explore this entire universe and constantly shift and adjust. But the stakes are so much greater that it does feel like there’s a tonal shift that’s happening, they’re facing even more life and death stakes. So we adjusted that all throughout the season.”

On the challenges they faced making a coming-of-age series while their young cast members age in real time:

Jonathan E. Steinberg: “Any story you’re hoping to tell with the variety of tones, you’re asking your actors to be funny, to be vulnerable, to go to emotional places that are really complicated—it’s hard to cast. It’s hard to write. It’s hard to manage all those tones. I think when you’re asking your partners, who are giving those performances to do that, who are 14 and 15 and 16 years old and haven’t lived a lot of that yet, and certainly, in some cases the first few productions, it’s a lot. You’re asking a lot. There’s no other way to do it and I think it was important to us that when you’re watching a show about kids, there are kids in that show telling the story. But you get really lucky and find kids who are able to come to work and give a performance that is so much more mature, We got really lucky. I think the ensemble of them is really gift in terms of how to tell the story. You couldn’t do it any other way and it’s a miracle that it actually landed in this place where we’re able to do it.”

Dan Shotz: “Andrew McIlroy is our acting coach/guru, who has really brought this ensemble together. They made them each member of this cast and giving them the tools to be responsible for each other and for their scene partners and the commitment to the work, and he has guided them so beautifully. They are in awe of him and we’re very grateful for having that piece of the puzzle to really make these kids shine.”

Craig Silverstein: “The other general philosophy is that as the they grow up, the show grows up. It gets a little bit darker, the stakes keep escalating. People get hurt this season, people die in the next. That kind of thing keeps moving with them.”

On if there was a character or storyline that became more prominent during development:

Craig Silverstein: “Clarisse is an important character for this season, especially because she’s the one who gets the quest. We wanted to follow Clarisse on that quest and it’s led to scenes that we were nervous about because we were pushing past the template that we had. Where it’s like, ‘Can we open a show without Percy?’ Those scenes are coming up and it helps that Clarisse is going to be following in the same footsteps of Percy in terms of getting a quest from the Oracle, a prophecy from the Oracle,and then going out and trying to pick her quest mates. That was something that we knew was important, but we approached with a lot of care and caution. Ultimately, it’s to the good of the story, because there’s a whole lot of stories that are happening around Percy. The book tells everything from his perspective, but there are lots and lots of stories happening around him and we wanted to use this medium to expand and capture all of them.”

Dan Shotz: “You can’t really do it without the actors like Dior Goodjohn, who plays Clarisse. She has to be able to carry that frame and want to have to invest in her and go on this journey with her. Once we knew we had the actor that Dior is and what she brings to it, it made it a lot easier because the audience is going to really respond to her. You were teased with her throughout Season 1, but now you really get to fully invest in her arc and what she’s going through.”

On whether there were any scenes that pushed production or the effects to the limit in Season 2:

Jonathan E. Steinberg: “The most complicated visual effects solution for the season is the one that’s hopefully the most invisible, and that’s Tyson’s eye. You’re introducing a new character into an ensemble of people you know very well and asking him to be the emotional center of it for a moment. That’s hard to do for anybody. Then when you’re trying to create a character who has to give a very human performance, without the benefit of eyebrows, and it’s hard. It’s hard to even think about how to go about doing it, and heading into this for all of the monsters and the tempest and the journey they’re going on it’s really the emotional intimate stuff that absolutely has to work or the whole center falls apart. I think getting to a place with ILM where they were able to create a new way of thinking about a solution and then finding Daniel [Dier], who was able to step into that solution and really breathe life into it. My hope is that 10 minutes into the show, you forget that Daniel has two eyes, but that took a lot of work to get there, to create a character that looked that natural and that seamless.”

On their goals for the season and whether they accomplished them:

Dan Shotz: “Yes. We’re excited for the whole world to get to see these episodes. You set out to grow with the show, not only because the cast is growing and maturing. We got to do a season of this show that we’re very proud of, and then how do we continue to evolve? How do we better ourselves? How do we learn from everything that happened in Season 1 and bring it to a Season 2? There’s so many things that we were able to do from all of that, all of that background, to make it again. The scope, the scale, is enormous this year. Being in the Sea of Monsters demanded that level of event. It’s like every episode is it’s own movie, because the adventure is that large, and is that demanding. But we feel like we were able to tackle each one, make each one really specific, as these kids go on this really epic, epic journey.”

On what they learned from the first season that they carried into season two:

Craig Silverstein: “The ambition to go deeper into some of the tonal aspects of parents. One of the things I was a huge fan of that Jon did in the first season was this idea of Percy’s mom protecting her kid from the other side of his family so that he retains his humanity as much as possible before that destiny of becoming a demigod comes from him. That’s something that I feel was teased out and elevated from the DNA of what’s in the books, and that was inspiring, I think, that there were other places that we could find where you could go deeper and bring something up out of that text on top. Also the idea that there are five books.We can pull from all five knowing where they’re all going. As Rick knew, but didn’t, he was writing forward as he went from Book 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and then creating that map. Now that those books are out, it’s like, we all know what’s happening, so we can kind of pick and move thread back and set things up in a way. All that stuff was pretty key”.

Jonathan E. Steinberg: “The process of learning who these kids are. Any character that’s well-constructed is a conversation between the page and the performer. This cast came to us in a place that was shockingly mature and have continued to get better. The process of learning their voices and bringing their personality and- their life into their characters is something that has to happen front to back. And is something that continues to add dimension to the story.”

On what adventure was their favorite to see brought to life:

Dan Shotz: “It has to be when the kids enter the Sea of Monsters. Figuring out Scylla and Charybdis, and how to achieve that was probably one of the greatest collaborations any of us have ever seen in our careers. Between performance, stunts, special effects, visual effects, set builds, the scope and scale of that sequence, and everybody signed on to make it as big and epic and exciting as possible. I feel like when I look back on that, I get chills when I watched in the mix, the final sound mix and got to see it all finished, we felt like what we had set out to do was delivered here for the audience.”

Craig Silverstein: “I have a surprising answer, because it surprised me, is when we were doing the final mix and when everything was coming together on Episode 5. That episode really has everything in it. It turned out to be my favorite and I didn’t know that when we were even shooting it. How it all came together with the sirens and everything, that’s a really satisfying part of the adventure.”

On the biggest challenge of remaining faithful to the lore while also while also incorporating your own story elements into those flashbacks, especially when it comes to Thalia:

Craig Silverstein: “A lot of that was drawn from Rick’s short stories, The Demigod Diaries, where he expanded and- talked about the time that young Annabeth, young Luke, and Thalia were on the run together. It’s stuff that’s referenced in Season 1, and so we thought it was appropriate to be able to dip back and show some of that material. You hear her name a lot—Thalia, Thalia, Thalia—and so the idea to get to see her and see her in action, see what she meant, and see her power, was sort of one of the first things that occurred, heading into the adaptation of this second book.”

Dan Shotz: “The fans of this story are going to be really excited by seeing that story come to life. Because that’s the benefit of the adaptation, where we can pull from all of these things, we can find that story. You get to invest in what happened and how we got to the place that we’re in right now. And what happens when we tell that flashback story is it’s really accenting everything that’s happening in the present, so they’re really talking to each other in a really nice way and it feels really elegantly, inserted into the Sea of Monsters story.”

On whether they felt more pressure heading into Season two:

Dan Shotz: “Yes! I don’t know if we think it’s pressure, you’re in a place where we’re so happy that people have responded the way they have to Season 1, and that the fans felt like they were getting the adaptation that they deserved and wanted and hoped for. You feel that you want to just keep honoring that, that you want to find new ways to tell the story while still honoring the books, and I hope that they feel that in this season. Everybody who works on this show are massive fans of the books, so we’re constantly talking about how to make sure that the DNA is throughout the entire adaptation. Even when we change things, even when we alter the story, that it still feels like it’s coming from the essence of why we all fell in love with this story.”

On the challenges that came with building the Ironclad set and filming on it:

Dan Shotz: “I think it’s a 175-foot deck that we built, and then when it actually has to enter the whirlpool of Charybdis, the crew, the construction crew, had to lift the entire 175-foot deck and put it on this tilt. It was like eight degrees. So that when we’re dumping water all over the set, that the water is actually pouring down, and when the cast comes out onto the deck and it is getting pulled into the vortex, that they are actually struggling to walk on this deck. It was-watching the hundreds of guys and gals lift this set and reconstruct it over, like, a three-day period? The we had to test it out and make sure everything was obviously safe but also that they could actually walk on this and run on it. It was such a massive undertaking. I think when you see it, you can really see it and feel it in the show.”

Craig Silverstein: “And the cherry on top is that that World War II aircraft cannon that Ares has retrofitted with celestial bronze bullets, that’s real. That’s a real…and we have somebody who came in who owns that thing. And it’s really heavy. And the set, it’s not made of actual iron, the Ironclad. That was a logistic and-engineering challenge for sure.

Dan Shotz: “But we always talk about it. That Ironclad sequence is one of the greatest collaborations. I said it before, I’ll say it again, it was just everybody had to be working in sync or that thing does not work.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is streaming on Disney+.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity