Rick Riordan unveils the cover for Percy Jackson and the Chalice of the Gods, teases new adventure

Fans of Percy Jackson have a lot to look forward to in the near future. A TV adaptation of Rick Riordan's beloved mythology series is currently in postproduction at Disney+, but there are new books on the way as well. The Sun and the Star, which Riordan co-wrote with Mark Oshiro, is out later this year and will tell a new story about demigod couple Nico DiAngelo and Will Solace.

In addition, Riordan will be checking back in with his original protagonist. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods is also due this year, telling a new tale about the son of Poseidon after the events of the initial five-book series.

EW caught up with Riordan to preview Percy's upcoming adventure. Check out the conversation below, along with the exclusive reveal of the cover for Chalice of the Gods.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Obviously you've been working on the new Percy Jackson show at Disney for a little while, and I assume a lot of that has been reconnecting with the beginnings of Percy's story and figuring out how to approach The Lightning Thief in this new way. So what inspired you to tell a new Percy story at the same time that you're revisiting his beginnings?

RICK RIORDAN: The idea for Chalice of the Gods actually started out when we were looking at the adaptation process again, and was kind of my idea to sort of pitch something that might be of interest to Disney overall as a way of saying, "Well, what we could do is if you guys are open to doing a new TV show, maybe I could revisit Percy and do a new Percy book for the first time in umpteen number of years."

Turns out I didn't need that as a pitch, but as we were going through the TV show process, I started, as you say, reconnecting with the characters and getting to know them all over again. And we started talking about what publishing could do to support the TV show. I thought back to the ideas that I had pitched for new Percy books, and that had kind of been stewing on the back burner there for a while, and it just felt like the right time. It felt like the right thing to do to celebrate Percy Jackson coming home to a new adaptation. And the story was just fun. I like the idea that Percy has a day-in-the-life adventure, and it's not the world is at stake.

We can all relate to that situation: "Oh Lord, I have to apply to college now." It's something I've been through with my kids, and I think especially a lot of the older readers might enjoy that. So it's been a lot of fun.

So this is an idea that had occurred to you over the years, but the timing wasn't right as you were caught up in other projects?

Yeah. I mean, it just didn't seem like the timing was right until all the cogs and the wheels kind of turned the same direction. It was very interesting working on the Chalice of the Gods while also working on The Lightning Thief as a TV season, because one informed the other. When my wife, Becky — who is always my first editor and my first reader — first read parts of Chalice of the Gods for me, she said, "It's amazing how much of the TV show is in this new book." Not content-wise, but in terms of voice and just little nuances that we snuck into the TV show that are informing the new book with Percy. So yeah, it's been a great amount of fun to do both at the same time.

You mentioned that the book will be following him in the college application process. How has Percy changed or grown since the last time we saw him on the page?

Well, the poor guy's still 17. I've stuck him in time. So he can't graduate high school, at least not yet. He's starting his senior year. This is after The Heroes of Olympus and before The Trials of Apollo. So it's his fall semester, senior year, new high school again. He and Annabeth and Grover are just trying to be New York kids and enjoy being seniors, but also avoiding the monster attacks. And the idea for him is that if he can just get through high school, statistically speaking, it gets a lot better for demigods, because by then they're a little too old and a little too powerful for monsters to be attacking every week. So they could conceivably have a normal adulthood, and that would be awesome. But when you're a demigod, you never take anything for granted.

So he's older and wiser, to a point. He has a lot of experience to draw on. He's not the new demigod on the block anymore, but he still has that same snarky sense of humor. The Percy Jackson voice was the easiest thing for me to get back into. It's just so near and dear to me. It was really lovely to be able to write from Percy's first-person point of view again, which I haven't done in quite a while.

I bet! You and I talked years ago at the Magnus Chase launch event in New York, and Trials of Apollo was going on at the same time. So you've done these other books, you've lived with these other protagonists like Magnus and Apollo. What is still fun about Percy as a protagonist after spending time with these other characters?

I mean, Percy is my alter ego in a lot of ways. He's also my son's alter ego. So I mean, he's really a member of my family. When I write Percy, it's like just chatting with a family member at the dinner table, and it's so familiar to me. So I'm not going to say it's easy, because I do have to work to channel his voice and be on point and make sure he's being clever enough and being Percy enough. But it is very familiar to me, and I like to compare the Percy voice to a comfortable lpair of jeans. I mean, you put them on and it's like you're at home. It's the easiest thing.

What can you tease about how college works for demigods? How did you build that out in this world?

In previous books I've kind of hinted that the plan, as Annabeth sees it, is that she and Percy will go to the demigod college at University of New Rome in the Bay Area in California. But at the same time, they will also be sort of dual-enrolling in a local mortal college.

So Annabeth is thinking UC Berkeley. I don't know if Percy can get in there with his grades, but that's the idea. That they will go to college together hopefully and be safe in the Bay Area, have a nice experience there, and then after that, who knows? She wants to study architecture and design. Percy just wants to pass!

The previous five Percy Jackson books touched on a lot of the "greatest hits" of Greek mythology, I guess you could call them. What Greek myths or characters were left over that you're now getting the chance to explore?

The amazing thing is even after writing about Greek and Roman mythology for 15 books, there are still characters, monsters, and gods that I haven't even touched. The obvious one is Ganymede, who is the center of this story. He's lost his cup, and he's the cupbearer of the gods.

That doesn't sound good.

Especially since the cup, if you drink from it and you're a mortal, it can make you immortal. So it's not one of those things you want floating around in the world. You kind of want to know where it is. So I had to dig into Ganymede's past and think about, "Okay, well, if he's lost his cup, why would that be?" Turns out there are a lot of people who have it in for Ganymede in Greek mythology, a lot of other gods who don't like him very much for various reasons. So it gave me a chance to get into some internal family politics among the Olympians that I haven't really explored. That's what it really is: It's about bickering among the family. It's not so much about the scary monsters. Sure, there are scary monsters too, but it's mostly about the bickering between the gods and how they always get in trouble. And then of course, they always need demigods to get them out of it.

Yeah, Hera's not his biggest fan, if I recall correctly.

That is true. Annabeth and Percy, having had their fill of Hera, are hoping that she's not behind this. They don't think so because it's a little bit beneath her, maybe, but there are a whole lot of other culprits to figure out. It's a whodunit, really: Who stole the cup?

That has some resonances with The Lightning Thief, right? Because a whodunit is how this all started.

Absolutely. And Percy remarks on that in Chalice of the Gods. It's like, "What is it with these gods? They need tracking devices on their artifacts."

Since we're doing the cover reveal for the book, I wanted to ask you a bit about this image of the chalice with these creatures coming out of it. They look like birds, and then maybe a snake or a hydra. What can you tell us about these images?

A lot of those are sacred animals to various gods, so there's a hint for you. They are symbols of the gods, but they're also creatures that Percy and Annabeth and Grover will actually have to face in one way or another. I love Victo Ngai's art because it's stylized, and it's very symbolic without being over-representational. I like that style because it reminds me of the retro '60s and '70s sci-fi and fantasy novels that I grew up on. The old Lord of the Rings covers sort of had that vibe to them, and I really respond to that. I think covers like that tend to engage your imagination and let you fill in the blanks, like you were just doing: "Okay, there's a bird. What does that mean?" That's what we want you to think. We want you to use your imagination and try to decode the mystery of all the symbols on the cover without it just being, boom, here's a kid with a sword fighting a big flaming thing.

Going back to Ganymede and his cup, you mentioned that it has these properties where mortals can drink it and become immortal. That can't help but remind me of not just the Holy Grail, but the antecedents of the Holy Grail in Celtic mythology, all the magic cauldrons. You've become something of an expert in comparative mythology over the years. As you were doing these deep dives on Ganymede, that must have struck you, the resemblances to some other mythologies.

Yeah. The chalice is such an omnipresent image in world mythology. It is so symbolic of so many things: It's both nourishment and life, but it's also poison and betrayal. It's power, but it's also warmth and family. It can mean so many things. And the missing cup, of course, as we know from the Holy Grail and everything else, that's one of the classic motifs of folklore and mythology. So it was fun to play with that.

It was especially fun because it made so much sense to me that if you have a cup that turns people immortal, the only demigod Ganymede would trust to look for something like that would be Percy, because he's literally the only living demigod who's ever turned down immortality.

So do you think of Chalice of the Gods as Percy Jackson and the Olympians book No. 6, or is it, like you say, more of just a day-in-the-life adventure?

I mean, I wanted it to read like Percy Jackson 6 in the sense that if you were to pick this up right after The Last Olympian, the tone would be very familiar. The characters would be familiar, the action would feel like a classic Percy Jackson book. Now, in terms of plot, it doesn't continue the story chronologically. It doesn't relate directly to those events.

This is, after all, a year or two years later. So it's more like a coda to the Percy Jackson series. And there are little references to things that happen in Heroes of Olympus, but I tried to be very conscious of the fact that you can read this book without necessarily having to know what happened in all 15 books previously.

It doesn't sound like you're tired of Percy or anything. Could you possibly come back for more in the future?

I mean, I had a good long break from writing the classic Percy novels. It's been well over a decade since I wrote in that voice, and I think that break was nice. I do think that going back to it now with the TV series made sense. It's sort of my version of a thank-you letter to all the fans who have stuck with me over the years and have been waiting for the TV show. It's my way of celebrating with them. It's like a high school reunion: Let's go back and see our old friends again and get back into that vibe that we had in the original series to celebrate The Lightning Thief being reborn.

I got into Percy young, I think before The Titan's Curse. That was the first new one for me when I was reading them. Now as a journalist and writer who covers this work, I can't help but notice how much the fan base has grown over the years, how intensely loyal they are, how interested they are in any new snippet about your work or Percy. It looks like they're going to have a really great couple of years ahead.

I certainly hope so. We're excited, and it is neat to see this multigenerational fandom get invested in the books and in the TV show as well. I mean, we would never have believed back in 2005 that Percy Jackson would still be a thing in 2023. I mean, that's a long good run, and every day just feels like gravy. It's like, I can't believe I'm still doing this, and they pay me money to write these stories. I feel very grateful.

We've been talking so much about Percy as a character, his viewpoint and his perspective. What are you excited for people to see about Walker Scobell's portrayal of him in the upcoming series?

Oh my gosh. Walker's Percy is just totally spot-on. I mean, it's really hard to take a book that is told 100 percent from a first-person narrator and translate it to film, because you can't… I mean, I guess you could have a voice-over narrative.

Yeah, but it's not the same.

It's not the same. So we have to figure out how to convey Percy's personality in other ways, through his lines of dialogue, through his expressions, through his actions. And Walker has that sense of alchemy. Everybody says this about him when they watch him perform: This kid is a superstar. The screen loves him, and he is so good and so natural and so dedicated at everything. It really is stunning, and he's a huge megafan of the books.

I kid you not, he's read the books more times than I have. So he's prereading The Sun and the Star right now. He could not wait. I was like, "Okay, I'll get you an advanced copy, but you have got to keep it to yourself." But that love of the series and the source material really comes through.

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