Interview With Percy Jackson and the Olympians Production and Costume Designers

At New York Comic Con 2023, The Geeky Waffle’s Candace Kaw got to attend a round table with Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ Costume Designer Tish Monaghan and Production Designer Dan Hennah to talk about their work on the upcoming, highly anticipated series, based on the bestselling novels by Rick Riordan.

The series stars Walker Scobell as Percy, Aryan Simhadri as Grover, and Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase, and already looks like a faithful adaptation of the beloved book series, that has since spawned spin-offs and continuations, making for a rich world of storytelling. With so much to look forward to, Candace asked both creatives what it was they were looking forward to audiences seeing the most. Hennah quickly responded he was most excited for people to see the world of Hades, saying:

For me, Hades. The whole world of Hades appealed to me. He’s the hardest working god, spends all day looking after all those people. But his world is surreal. We decided to go with a very monotone, white on grey, grey on black on white world. And also this world is upside down. His palace is his form of Mt. Olympus, upside-down, also just the concept of it being the underworld, so what's up above it's not the sky, its actually mountains, and all that business, his world is down here. And then we’ve got the layer down there that people walk on, so gravity is being defied. So lots of opportunities to do some really surreal stuff. We had costumes there as well. But particularly slightly spooky, weird stuff.

Monaghan said the costume she was most looking forward to audiences seeing was Medusa’s, telling Candace:

I'm excited for them to see the character of Medusa, and I don't want to do any spoilers, but it'll be a Medusa costume unlike any other Medusa costume, and with a lot of influence from John Steinberg and Dan Shotz, because they had a very specific look that they were going for, and I added to that look. All I can say is that it does have some Grecian influence. But it will be a surprise.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians premieres on December 22. Watch the clip of their conversation with Candace below: