Walker Scobell Teases How ‘Percy Jackson’ Season 3 Will Be Darker Than Ever

Not only will Season 3 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians bring one of the series’ books to life for the first time, but it will mark a departure in tone from the show’s first two seasons.

The Disney+ show will return with new episodes later this year, adapting the third novel in Rick Riordan‘s Percy Jackson book series, The Titan’s Curse. While readers may be aware of what adventures lie in store for the gang of demigods, Walker Scobell teased that viewers will still be surprised by Season 3 and its more serious story.

“It’s definitely our darkest season yet,” the actor, who portrays the show’s titular son of Poseidon, shared in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Tuesday, July 21. “When you’re reading the books, the first [The Lightning Thief] gets you into it, and then The Titan’s Curse is when it really hooks into the meat of the story.”

Like The Titan’s Curse book, Season 3 will follow Percy and his fellow demigods as they set off on a mission to rescue Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries) and the goddess Artemis (Dafne Keen) after they are kidnapped by Kronos’ evil army. To save their friends, Percy teams up in part with the daughter of Zeus, Thalia Grace (Tamara Smart).

“It’s difficult because I think Percy and Thalia are so similar they fill the same spot in a team in a way,” Scobell said of Percy and Thalia’s dynamic. “Whether it’s Grover (Aryan Simhadri), Annabeth, or Tyson (Daniel Diemer), they fill that same area, so they’re constantly fighting.”

Disney / David Bukach

Executive producer Craig Silverstein noted that Percy and Thalia’s relationship will be the “central dynamic” of the season, given the roles they both play in the Great Prophecy, which states that a child of one of the “Big Three” gods (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) will make a decision that will save Mount Olympus or destroy it once they reach the age of 16.

“It’s a question of not just who is going to be the hero of prophecy and going to save or destroy Olympus, but is it going to be me or you?” Silverstein told the outlet. “And you throw into that mix that they don’t really know each other, and that the one person who connects them is Annabeth, and Annabeth is taken away… They both care about her, they’re both not sure about each other, but they have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and figure out how to work with each other.”

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Sticking with Season 3’s darker tone, Silverstein noted that the new episodes will raise the stakes significantly. “We had a lot more blood in Season 2 than we had in Season 1, and now the next step is death, right? People are dying, and the stakes just keep dialing up, and getting more real,” he teased. “We’re always trying to calibrate how scary a certain monster looks for young viewers. And what’s scary? What can they tolerate right from the very first episode? I mean, our manticore is pretty scary.”

Season 3 will also feature several new cast additions, including Levi Chrisopulos and Olive Abercrombie as siblings Nico and Bianca Di Angelo, Hubert Smielecki as Apollo, Ming-Na Wen as Hera, and Kate McKinnon as Aphrodite.

“[The Titan’s Curse is] really where all the final pieces come onto the board related to Great Prophecy and Kronos. The Titans make their appearance. It’s the book and the season where the larger saga really comes into focus,” Silverstein said of Season 3. “It’s always been there in the background. We’ve brought it forward more in the show, and this is where the conflict — the war — really starts to kick off.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Season 3 Premiere, TBA, Disney+