Aryan Simhadri (Disney’s Spin) and Leah Sava Jeffries (Empire) have been cast as fellow heroes in the forthcoming Disney+ original series Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Simhadri and Jeffries will portray Percy’s pals Grover and Annabeth, respectively, and will co-star with Walker Scobell, who will play Percy Jackson’s eponymous character. A big percentage of the primary cast has been cast now that the buddy group has been completed, giving fans a decent sense of who to anticipate when production on the series begins next month.
Grover Underwood, played by Simhadri, is a satyr (half boy, half goat) dressed as a 12-year-old boy. Grover is described as a compassionate man that is great friends with Percy, whom he is always willing to protect or fight beside. Annabeth Chase, played by Jeffries, is the daughter of Athena and a smart strategist who comes to the human world to put her intelligence to the test. Annabeth begins to teach Percy to endure the hardships of the legendary realm after meeting him, while he helps her reconnect to her humanity.
The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, based on Riordan‘s bestselling Camp Half-Blood Chronicles book, will be directed by James Bobin from a script co-written by Riordan and Jon Steinberg (The Old Man).
Riordan, Bobin, Steinberg, Dan Shotz, Rebecca Riordan, Bert Salke, Monica Owusu-Breen, Jim Rowe, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Jeremy Bell, and D.J. Goldberg of Gotham Group are executive producers.
The Percy Jackson novel series began in 2005 with The Lightning Thief, a major bestseller that inspired four sequels: The Sea of Monsters, The Titan’s Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last Olympian, as well as five supplement novels and graphic novel versions of each.
