Interview: Brandon T Jackson - Magical moments of satyr

Published on Monday 8 February 2010 18:05

'I'VE never seen a black satyr – it's cool."

• Brandon T Jackson, Alexandra Daddario and Logan Lerman in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Picture: Complimentary

'I'VE never seen a black satyr – it's cool." Brandon T Jackson, stand-up comedian and TV star best known for his role as Alpa Chino in Ben Stiller's action-spoof Tropic Thunder, sounds sleepy on a crackly line from Los Angeles, but his enthusiasm for his new role is clear through the yawns. Jackson plays Grover Underwood, half-goat, half-man, in the first of this year's Greek mythology-inspired blockbusters, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.

"I think people are going to be surprised because I've never seen anybody be a satyr of this kind – I'm dancing in the casino, chasing girls, there's a lot of things that no-one will have seen before," Jackson adds. "I played Grover very cool, cool and funny and charming. But at the same time he has a lot of heart."

The title may be unwieldy (at one point it was the even less manageable Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief) but expectations are high for the movie, directed by Chris Columbus (who was at the helm of the first two Harry Potter adventures). The trailers suggest that it will be a special effects extravaganza, but an impressive cast, including Uma Thurman as Medusa, Sean Bean as Zeus and Pierce Brosnan as Percy's centaur (half-horse, half-man) teacher, hint that there's more than just CGI to this mythological quest.

Based on the first novel of Rick Riordan's best-selling five-book series, the movie chronicles the adventures of Percy Jackson (played by Logan Lerman) when he discovers that as well as being beset by some more common teenage problems – struggling with dyslexia and having a penchant for holding his breath while sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool – he is also the demigod son of Poseidon, the god of the sea (Kevin McKidd). And just so it doesn't get boring, Percy also learns that the gods of Mount Olympus aren't in fact perched on a cloud-trimmed mountain top, they have a suite of offices on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building and they walk the streets of New York, just like Percy and his sidekicks, childhood friend, Grover, and demigod Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of the goddess Athena.

Cue thunderbolts, angry blokes with beards and mythical creatures aplenty going to battle as Jackson attempts to stop a global catastrophe, discover the truth about his identity and rescue his mother (Catherine Keener) who has been kidnapped by a Mick Jagger-esque Hades (Steve Coogan).

"I love Greek mythology," says Jackson, who read Riordan's books before auditioning for the part as Grover. "I think the best thing about the movie is that we get to show the characters as young people. It's young Greek gods; I don't think people will have ever seen that twist, somebody's dad being Poseidon – that's a movie you've never seen before."

Jackson has only good things to say about director Chris Columbus, who he says made the shoot a totally absorbing experience.

"There are moments with him that are just unreal," Jackson says. "I don't know how to explain it. I hate to keep using the word magical but there are these moments, he gets you to the place where you can believe it's real, everyone believes it – the audience, us. He'd be yelling about there's a dragon, or there's Medusa and her snakes are biting at you. It was cool."

Shot in Vancouver, Jackson says the film was hard work but the atmosphere created by Columbus made things much easier: "It was like a dream land. It was like we were really in a different world. There was something magical about the whole situation. It wasn't like we were in Vancouver, it felt like everything was really happening."

And although the creation of Grover's furry legs meant that Jackson had to slip into a fetching pair of green tights for the significant CGI element of the film, even that couldn't take the edge off the experience.

"All my friends were like, 'Yo, where you legs at man? Where's yo legs?'" Jackson laughs. "It looks so real. You only see a quick flash on the trailer but they are so convincing. It's cool."

Jackson grew up in inner city Detroit, one of six children born to a bishop father and a pastor mother. At the age of 14 he started to perform stand-up comedy before a move to LA led to small parts in movies which built to Tropic Thunder in which he played opposite Ben Stiller, Jack Black and a blacked-up Robert Downey Jnr.

"When I worked with Robert Downey Jnr, he just taught me so much: different ways to do things, there are so many different ways to skin a cat," Jackson says. He says that Downey had stayed in character throughout the shoot even when no filming was being done. "He taught me how to really embody a character. That's what he does – he really goes there."

Jackson says that Brosnan was the same on Percy Jackson…, walking around on stilts to create the effect of his centaurian stature. He adds that working with such high calibre actors on Percy Jackson… has helped him to make the decision to move away from the stand-up comedy that brought him to attention (he even had his own TV show at one point) to pursue his acting career.

"I want to be an action star," he says. "Acting is very different to stand-up. You've got to really play a character – that's the hardest part, you've got to work out what they would do. You have to be believable, you have to embody it. Stand up is joke after joke after joke."

No other franchise – not Disney's trips to CS Lewis's Narnia nor the critically mauled The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman novel – has quite captured the box office magic of Hogwarts or its ability to appeal to older teens, but with five Riordan books to play with, there must surely be a chance of a sequel?

"Grover's in every book," Jackson says instantly, failing to play it even remotely cool. "If there's going to be two and three, I'm definitely in it."

&#149 Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is on general release from Friday