If you’ve seen Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, you probably got a kick out of Nathan Fillion as Hermes, especially when he made a reference to his very popular but very short-lived television show, Firefly.
Director Thor Freudenthal recently talked to Hypable about how that role came to be and why Nathan Fillion was the perfect Hermes:
“I worked with a great writer on this film, and I told him that we would cast Nathan. And he instantly went back to the computer and revised lines. He actually wrote a very direct Firefly reference into it that had Hermes say, ‘Hey, the best show ever is Firefly.’ And that really takes you out of the movie. So while it was a great sort of general direction to go in, Nathan came up with ‘Greatest television show ever so of course, canceled.’”
The director said that Fillion, who plays Hermes, brought a lot of what fans already love about the actor to Sea of Monsters. “He’s got razor sharp comedic timing. He does a lot of his own tweaking of dialogue and writing. Literally you can tell him ‘Okay you have to cross from here to there, but we don’t have enough words to fill that.’ So he’s like, ‘Okay I’ve got something’ and then it’s the funniest line in the scene.”