First News

What’s the movie all about?

The movie starts off with a big dilemma because Zeus has lost his powerful lightning bolt and they are all pointing fingers at Percy Jackson. They think he stole it because he is the only offspring of one of the big three gods: Poseidon. But Percy himself has no idea who he is and knows nothing about his background. He just thinks his father was some guy who left him and his mother. Then suddenly he’s thrown into this dangerous situation and has to save the world and his mum.

How did you get the part of Percy?

When I was approached about the film and heard that Chris Columbus was directing, I said:  ‘Man, I have to be a part of this.’  Chris was my hero growing up. The Harry Potter films just blew me away and I loved his other films. I didn’t really know anything about the books, but I read the first Percy Jackson book immediately and liked it a lot.  

Does it feel like a big responsibility, playing such a popular character? 

It does not feel like pressure. I didn’t realise what I had got myself into when I started out. But I began training a couple months before filming began and it started to become real to me. I was working out in LA with Brandon T Jackson (who plays Grover) and Jake Abel (who plays Luke) and we became immersed in the project.  The scale of the film and what it meant never really hit me until I got on set and we started filming. I saw these fantastic sets and thought:  ‘Who did I fool to get to this point, man?’ I just had to step up and try to do my part to make it good.

What’s Percy like?

He is the leader of the group. He’s the kind of guy who feels he has to be the strong one in the family. He has a lot of pent up anger about his father abandoning him and his mother. He is also angry that his mom, whom he loves, is married to a horrible man named Gabe. Percy is just a guy trying to find his place in the world. Then he is thrown into an extraordinary situation, where he
has to figure everything out very quickly. Percy is still a teenager, even though he’s a demigod. That is why this movie is awesome and why it’s so relatable. He is like any
other guy you’d see on the street; he’s just a kid who’s in an extraordinary situation and has to try to survive.

To see the Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief trailer click here

To join the Firstnews.co.uk book club where we are reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief trailer click here

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