It takes a lot to play a demigod on screen inPercy Jackson & the Olympians, Disney+’s hit series based onRick Riordan’s book series of the same name. But it’s arguably harder to get into the mindset of a cyclops, the challenge faced byDaniel Diemer, the newest addition to the young adult cast of the series, which returns for Season 2 this December.
Diemer stars as Tyson, Percy’s (Walker Scobell) half-brother andnew addition to the Camp Half-Blood teamwho just so happens to be a cyclops. With the mind of a child, Tyson is initially a hindrance to Percy’s quest to rescue Grover (Aryan Simhadri) from the clutches of the much larger and more infamous cyclops Polyphemus, though he eventually grows to love his half-brother, a fan-favorite character whose appearance was highly discussed ahead of the Season 2 trailer released yesterday.
So just how does becoming a cyclops work? At Collider’s SDCC studio, alongside fellow stars, Scobell, Simhadri,Leah Sava Jeffries,Dior Goodjohn, andCharlie Bushnell, Diemer revealed toPerri Nemiroffthat he didn’t have to deal with the usual burdens of playing a monster on screen — i.e., heavy makeup or a series of dots on his face to align a model placed over his face in post-production. “I’m just appearing like this on the day,” he said, referring to his own face, “and all the magic is done after, I don’t have special eye lines, they don’t have to look at me…or like, look higher or lower or anything, or with a specific eye. Everything’s just us interacting with one another.”
It’s Tyson Time!
In order to create Tyson’s adorable cyclops face, he had what the cast collectively refers to as “Tyson Time,” wherehis face is scanned from every possible anglein order to gain as much information they can about the structure of his face, so that editors could merge his actual eyes into one:
After each scene…they basically take my two eyes and combine them into one. [It’s] based off of them being able to kind of get all the lighting, the environment, and everything, so that when they’re doing all the computer generated effects, or all their magic, they’re able to have as much information as possible to use. And so at the end of each scene, I have to go in there and I just get bombarded with questions, and I have to just turn around and look all over the place so they can see my eyes from every single angle, and we got some fun stories out of me.
The rest of Diemer’s castmates were equally amused by Tyson Time, with Scobell noting that “they would ask some weird questions, because they’d need to get the emotion he was feeling on the day out of him,” and Simhadri hoping that they would eventually release some of the raw footage of the twenty-eight-year-old actor.
“The seamlessness is amazing,” Diemer says of the process, “because it just allows me to kind of enter into the complexity of his character. Especiallyplaying a character that’s like ababy monster, and I think that’s a big jump in certain aspects from who I normally am, and so just getting a lot of freedom [was nice.]”
Percy Jackson & the OlympiansSeason 2 premieres on December 10. Stay tuned to Collider for more news from San Diego Comic-Con as it arrives.
