Disney’s Percy Jackson Reboot Lands ‘The Adam Project’ Star as Lead

Disney has found its Percy Jackson, and it’s rising young star Walker Scobell.

Newcomer Scobell recently came to public attention in Netflix’s The Adam Project, starring opposite Ryan Reynolds and Zoe Saldaña.

It would appear that the Disney+ reboot may follow the Percy Jackson book series more closely, as Percy was much younger in the books than he was in the movies. The “aging up” of the characters was one of many complaints fans had about the aborted movie series.

Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter…

Walker Scobell (The Adam Project) has landed the title role in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a series adaptation of author Rick Riordan’s best-selling novels. Riordan, an executive producer of the series, announced the news Monday morning on his website.

“Walker Scobell is an incredibly talented young man who blew us away with his audition tapes for the role of Percy,” Riordan wrote. “Many of you recently discovered how great Walker is when you watched his movie The Adam Project, in which Walker lit up the screen as a younger version of Ryan Reynolds’ character. We were fortunate enough to audition Walker months before that movie came out, but the film only confirmed what we already knew about his talent. It was obvious to me and the rest of the team that Walker had the perfect mix of comedic timing, sweetness, rebelliousness, snark and heroism to embody our hero Percy Jackson.”

12-year-old Scobell has the acting chops. He played a younger version of Ryan Reynolds’ character in The Adam Project, and the kid even had Reynold’s lines from the R-rated Deadpool 2 memorized… much to Reynold’s own astonishment.

[Source: The Hollywood Reporter]