‘Percy Jackson’: Toby Stephens Wants More Poseidon & Sally Flashbacks in Future Seasons
Spoiler Alert
Bring on the Monsters!
For exclusive news and updates, subscribe to our Percy Jackson and the Olympians Newsletter:
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 1 Episode 7, “We Find Out the Truth, Sort Of.”]
Toby Stephens‘ Poseidon made his long-awaited debut in Percy Jackson and the Olympians Episode 7, streaming now on Disney+. The scene was a departure from the source material but a welcome one as it teed up next week’s finale with an incredibly exciting cliffhanger.
Poseidon made his first appearance in a flashback with Sally Jackson (Virginia Kull). In it, Sally has summoned Poseidon to a restaurant where she and young Percy (Azriel Dalman) have just gotten into a fight over Percy’s new school. The stress of caring for Percy on her own has gotten to Sally, so she calls on her ex to show up for her and their son. She can’t talk about the truth about Percy’s life with anyone. Even if they believed in demigods and the rulers of Olympus, revealing Percy’s whereabouts isn’t safe, as monsters will soon start hunting the young half-blood. Having no one to talk to about her unique parenting struggles is possibly the most “unfair” part of it all, Poseidon says in the scene, so he’s there to listen.
Stephens spoke with TV Insider all about his Percy Jackson debut, including this book change that brought about the touching flashback. The Black Sails star shares that even though Poseidon turns down Sally’s offer to meet Percy in the restaurant, Poseidon is clearly desperate to be with his ex and their son, saying his character “yearns to have this connection with him, but because of circumstances he can’t.”
“What I liked about [the flashback scene], just in the way that it’s placed in the story, is that for so many episodes [Poseidon’s] been absent. His presence has been felt through various kinds of interventions that he’s made, but you don’t see the connection,” Stephens explains. “So it’s easy for an audience to just go, this absentee father doesn’t really care, has no sort of visceral connection with the child or the mother. And you have this scene where you understand that he does have a very visceral connection to this family — to both the mother and the son — and that it’s very painful for both of them, for all of them, all three of them. It’s painful, and it’s raw, and it’s real.”
Stephens hopes the scene makes it clear that Sally and Poseidon’s bond “is a real relationship.”
Sally Jackson and Young Percy (Disney/David Bukach)
“I think it hopefully will allow the audience to feel that connection that they have and that he yearns to have with his son,” Stephens says, adding, “Yes, Poseidon is a god, but he also has human feelings. Going back to the original Greek myths, the great thing about these gods was that they were just as fallible, if not more fallible than human beings, and they suffered the same problems.”
Episode 7 saw the golden trio make it to the Underworld and nearly save Sally from Hades (Jay Duplass), who has her frozen in gold like Percy (Walker Scobell) briefly was on Hephaestus’ (Timothy Omundson) throne in Episode 5. Grover (Aryan Simhadri) lost his magical pearl (their ticket back to the world of the living) when he was trapped inside Cerberus’ mouth (the three-headed dog nearly swallowed the satyr, but he made it out alive), and Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries) used her pearl to escape a forest of regretful souls that threatened to trap her there forever. That left Percy and Grover with just two pearls to get themselves back home and return Zeus’ master bolt to Olympus.
Ares (Adam Copeland) had hidden the bolt in the backpack he gave Percy in Episode 5. This discovery was made after Luke’s (Charlie Bushnell) flying Converses nearly pulled Grover down into Tartarus, the abyss that keeps the titans captive. They still don’t know who stole the bolt for Ares, but they have to return it to Zeus to stop an all-out war. Hades agreed to free Sally if Percy retrieved his helm, which they deduced was in Ares’ possession. Percy realized that there was only one being with whom Ares would side: Kronos, the father of the Olympians, whom Zeus tore to pieces and imprisoned in Tartarus.
The episode ended with Percy leaving the Underworld without his mom, but he’s not giving up on her rescue. He and Grover ended up on the beach of their Montauk cabin, where Annabeth and Ares were waiting. As the finale teaser shows, Percy and Ares will have an epic battle in Episode 8. Poseidon and Sally’s scene tees up this moment perfectly when Sally asks if he wants to meet his son.
“One day, when he’s ready, when he knows who he is and where he belongs, and fate has revealed to him his true path,” Poseidon says as the battle-ready Ares approaches Percy, Annabeth, and Grover on the shoreline. “On that day, I’ll be right by his side.”
Creating this scene for the series with Kull was “lovely,” Stephens shares, calling her “a wonderful actress.” Now that they’ve made one flashback scene, Stephens feels they have to make more. Sally and Poseidon’s relationship is the kind of “prequel territory” that a TV adaptation allows you to dive into, and he’s eager to dive into this narrative space in possible future seasons.
“In the books, [Poseidon] comes in and out of it, but if you set up this whole relationship, you can’t just sort of drop it in subsequent [seasons]. You need to tell that story, and it needs to be something that comes in and out,” he says.
Whether it’s Percy, Annabeth, Grover, or any of the other young occupants of Camp Half-Blood, Percy Jackson and the Olympians is “about kids growing up and all of the problems that they go through,” Stephens says. “I think relationships with parents — whether it’s mother-son, father-son — that’s very much part of it because when you’re growing up, you do it in reference to your parents.” In Stephens’ view, understanding Percy means understanding his mom and dad, and that will require expanding their backstory beyond what is written in Rick Riordan‘s books.
Percy, Annabeth, and Grover brave the Underworld in Percy Jackson and the Olympians Episode 7 (Disney/David Bukach)
With Poseidon only appearing in two episodes in Season 1, Stephens didn’t get to spend much time with Scobell as others in the cast. But he had enough time to know that “Walker is fantastic.” He also noticed similarities in their personalities, which only strengthened their on-screen father-son bond.
“He’s a lovely human being, for a start. He is a great guy, and it was really easy working with him,” Stephens says. “It was just like an immediate connection. He really likes having fun, and he’s a prankster and enjoys having fun on set, which is totally me.”
The Percy Jackson set was familiar territory for the actor, who starred as Captain Flint in Starz‘s Black Sails from 2014-2017. Percy Jackson showrunners and executive producers Jon Steinberg and Dan Shotz created the pirate drama. They brought Stephens’ Black Sails co-star Jessica Parker Kennedy into the mythological fold as Medusa, who shares a dark history with Poseidon in both the Greek myth and the Disney+ series.
Poseidon and Athena (Annabeth’s mother, who’s not seen in Season 1 but is often spoken of) are to blame for Medusa’s curse that has left her forever isolated. In the Greek myth, Poseidon assaulted Medusa, and Athena punished the woman instead of the god. Kennedy’s Medusa alludes to being a “survivor” of Poseidon and Athena’s mistreatment in Episode 3, an alteration from Medusa’s story in The Lightning Thief book. Stephens loved this updated take on Medusa in the series.
“I really like it,” he says of his former co-star’s appearance. “I think the way they’ve handled all of it actually has been so clever, so deft and witty.”
“I just think they’ve done a brilliant job at bringing it to the present … without warping the meaning of the books and the context,” he goes on. Book changes are also “inevitable” when being adapted for the screen, he says. “You cannot just doggedly stick to the books. It wouldn’t work because novels work in a very specific way in the way that they connect with the reader than TV or film. And so inevitably, you have to change things, and I just think that they’ve done it incredibly tastefully and really well.”
Next week, Percy fights Ares, we meet the final Olympian yet to be revealed this season (the late, great Lance Reddick in one of his final performances), and a prophecy is fulfilled.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Season 1 Finale, Tuesday, January 30, 9/8c, Disney+
