"Percy Jackson and the Olympians" Season 2 Costume Team Reveal How They Built Monsters by Hand at SDCC
San Diego Comic-Con gave fans a rare look at just how much work goes into dressing gods, monsters, and one very put-upon twelve-year-old demigod, with a panel dedicated entirely to the costume department behind Percy Jackson and the Olympians season 2. The panel opened with a sizzle reel of the season's costumes in design and motion before settling into a conversation that made clear just how much of the show's Sea of Monsters mythology was built by hand.
Costume designer Catherine "Kate" Adair (The Mysterious Benedict Society Season 1), assistant costume designer David Matwijkow (Perry Mason Season 2), key costumer Daniel Mahler Landman (Descendants: Wicked Wonderland), specialty costumer Tannis Hegan (Tron: Ares), and producer Zoe Neary (co-producer, The Old Man Season 2).
Neary opened by explaining her role as the connective tissue between costumes, sets, props, and hair and makeup, all of which have to move in lockstep even though they're rarely all in the same room. Because television shoots and preps simultaneously, a single day might mean being on set, at a fitting, and reviewing storyboards for a scene weeks away, all at once. Neary credited the show's success to that constant cross-department communication, largely conducted through an ongoing stream of group chats and texts that keep everyone reading from the same script, literally and figuratively.
Season 2 adapts The Sea of Monsters, which meant Adair's department inherited a much bigger monster workload than Season 1. Adair recalled returning to the show after a two-year gap and immediately confronting the challenge of designing an entire roster of practical creatures rather than leaning on visual effects.
The Cyclopes and giants were the biggest puzzle. Performers on stilts naturally end up with two visible "knees" on camera, the hinge of the stilt and the actor's real knee higher up, which reads awkwardly on screen unless it's solved with costuming. Adair and Matwijkow, longtime collaborators, worked out a boot design that anchored around a hidden brace to disguise the extra joint. Each giant ended up with two versions of the same boot: a heavier, fully detailed version for close-ups and a lighter one for shots where the performer needed to run or cover distance. The bulkier boots also helped with scale, since taller legs needed broader shoulders and torsos built up to match, so the proportions read correctly next to the human cast.
For the show's smaller-scale giants, the team turned to their prosthetics artist, who scanned the faces of just three background performers and then reused those molds across multiple looks, varying hairpieces and paint to generate an entire crowd of distinct-looking creatures out of a small pool of actors.
The hardest costume to pull off, by the team's own account, was the sirens: fully practical, wire-rigged creatures whose rock-textured skirts had to move convincingly while being manipulated on cables. Sourcing the fabric meant a phone call from the Vancouver shop to Los Angeles asking for fifty yards of something that looked like stone, which the team found in a heavily textured double-sided wool before shipping it north for hand manipulation. Every seashell and rock-like embellishment on the costume was cast and painted by hand rather than sourced, since nothing that looked right already existed. The design itself, fusing the sirens with coral and plant life rather than going the more traditional sea-dwelling route, grew out of the show's setting: the sirens are trapped in a cove that ships must pass through to escape, and the concept became that they've been there so long they've physically fused with the landscape. The costumes were built so the sirens' silhouettes obscure where body ends and rock or coral begins, making it genuinely hard to tell where one creature stops and another starts.
Landman spoke to why the production kept a satellite office in Los Angeles even while filming in Vancouver: decades of film industry infrastructure mean LA still has fabric, trim, and vendor resources that simply don't exist elsewhere, even in a production hub like Vancouver. That meant daily shipments between the two cities. As an example, Landman noted that Percy's seemingly simple pair of jeans actually represented roughly thirty pairs once the hero costume, the stunt double's costume, and every stage of aging and distressing were accounted for.
That LA hustle also produced one of the panel's better running bits: Landman's search for the exact right plain shirt for Annabeth led him to buy out every American Eagle in Southern California, more than once, to the point that store employees started to recognize him coming. When stock ran out entirely, the team had no choice but to hand-build near-identical replicas to match the original fabric for stunt use.
Some of the season's most research-intensive costumes belonged to the undead sailors, a crew pulled from different eras and countries of naval history. Landman and Matwijkow started broad, researching maritime uniforms across centuries before narrowing in on specific navies and time periods that fit the story. One especially memorable rabbit hole involved a Russian sailor's cap: the ribbon style hasn't changed much since the mid-1800s, and the lettering on an authentic tally ribbon traditionally names the ship the sailor served on. That detail sent the team down a full research sprint into Russian naval history looking for a vessel that had actually been lost in battle, so the reference would hold up. A handful of historically accurate options were passed up the chain for approval, translated, and ultimately embroidered onto the finished ribbon.
Water posed its own hazards. Several key shots called for characters emerging from the ocean, and the costume team quickly learned that not every fabric survives a soaking gracefully. Certain trousers, once wet, sagged into shapeless folds the crew likened to pancakes, which meant testing garments in water ahead of time and choosing footwear and boat assignments based on which cast members could physically manage walking in soaked costumes. Leather jackets got the same scrutiny, since the team needed styles that could get fully drenched on camera and still hold their shape and shine once dry.
Weather added another layer of difficulty. Vancouver rain didn't always cooperate with the shooting schedule, so scenes had to be resequenced on the fly, which meant tracking costume continuity, wet versus dry, torn versus pristine, across days that weren't shot in story order. The sirens were a particular continuity challenge: Hegan helped design each siren's rock-textured skirt to crumble in a specific, repeatable way, mixing soft and rigid materials so the effect could be recreated consistently no matter when a given shot was captured.
Adair spent real time on how Percy and Annabeth's wardrobes evolve this season, describing a shift toward calmer, more grounded tones for Percy that mirror his emotional growth, while Annabeth's palette gets more assertive and fiery to match her more opinionated season two arc. Annabeth's costume also leans harder into a specific reference point this year: a red flannel worn knotted around the waist, styled with a nod to nineties London punk. The team pulled roughly twenty different flannel patterns before settling on the final choice, and put comparable effort into finding a leather jacket durable enough to survive repeated soakings without losing its look.
Asked how the show keeps its Olympians grounded despite the mythological setting, Adair explained that the goal was making the gods feel timeless without feeling like costume-party versions of themselves. The team leaned on the personality details already present in Rick Riordan's books, like Mr. D's loud Hawaiian shirts or Poseidon's beachcomber energy, and translated those traits into modern silhouettes rather than literal togas, so each god reads as a distinct, lived-in character rather than a generic deity.
That same research-first approach applied to one of the season's most anticipated costumes, a bridal look drawn from a vividly described moment in the source material. Adair admitted to feeling the pressure of getting this one right long before it ever hit the fitting room, and got a preview of just how invested fans were when Aryan Simhadri came in for his first fitting and, before even looking at the dress itself, started pulling up fan art other people had sent him of their dream dress. Adair's own vision placed the gown inside a shipwrecked crate from the late 1800s tucked away in Polyphemus's cave, which sent her digging into period dress research. But she also wanted a way to tie Grover into the design, which is where the hand-embroidered birds and woodland motifs came from. The inspiration for that embroidery actually started with a set costumer named Pat, who made felt birds on her own time that ended up shaping the final look. Matwijkow spoke to the more logistical headache of the piece: finding a fabric they could actually source enough of to build the multiple versions of the dress needed to survive the action sequences it had to hold up through.
Audience Q&A gave aspiring costume designers in the audience a chance to get career advice, and the answer from the panel was consistent: learn every discipline, not just design. Understanding construction, patternmaking, and how materials actually behave gives a designer the shared language needed to communicate with every other department, since a beautiful sketch is only useful if it can be built and it functions on set. For those interested in practical effects specifically, Hegan recommended building skills across painting, sculpting, and even carpentry, along with modern 3D modeling and printing, which more specialty costumers are relying on to hit television's famously tight turnaround times.
Season 2 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, based on Rick Riordan's The Sea of Monsters, is streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu. Season 3 premieres November 22nd on Disney+, giving the costume team plenty more Greek mythology to bring to life.