Master Chief is one of the most iconic characters in gaming, but unlike most of our medium's biggest stars, we have no idea what he looks like. There's just the armour, the iconography, and the voice. Halo Infinite, the most recent title, was even marketed under this premise, with a website allowing you to scan your face into the helmet being promoted by all manner of diverse influencers and celebrities. The message was clear - anyone can be Master Chief. You, no matter who you are, can be Master Chief. In the Paramount+ TV show, that's not possible. Master Chief is very clearly not you, he is Pablo Schreiber, and he takes off the helmet extremely early - a choice that many may find controversial. I asked Schreiber about this decision, and whether it made it easier to inject a sense of personality to the role, but to hear him tell it, that didn't factor into his approach.

"I don't think that's a fair assessment," he says. "I think it's not injecting my character. I think I'm the actor who has been asked to play the character. The armour is obviously the iconic part of Chief that we all know from the video game. But let's be honest, the video game is a first person shooter video game where you're asked to play as the Chief himself. That's why the character has been kept as a symbol and very vague. There's not a lot of character development with him. He represents bravery and courage, but all the subtleties and nuance of who he is, as a human, we fill in the details ourselves as gamers.

“Making a television show is a very, very different medium. When you make a television show, it's no longer a first person shooter video game, you now are being asked as a player to put the controller down, to sit back on the couch and enjoy a universe that you have come to know and love for so long, but to experience it in a very different way. And the process of John discovering who he is, as a human being over the course of the first season is a similar process to us as audience members, learning who the Chief is all of those elements of his persona that we've filled in with our own personal details for so long, we're now filling in, in television storytelling format. If you can get on board and enjoy the experience of that, then I think for avid Halo fans, it's going to be a very, very rewarding experience to get to take that journey in a different way. For new people who have never experienced the Halo universe before, it's an opportunity to be exposed to this incredibly rich and well thought out universe that we've all come to love over the past 20 years. So I'm very excited for both groups of people."

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Of course, injecting character into someone like Master Chief might go against who Master Chief is - he may be iconic, but he is not acclaimed for his vibrant personality or range of emotions. He's a man of few words, and Schreiber described the process of bringing a character like that to life. "I think Chief was developed that way and remained that way for so long so that we could feel like we are him as we play the game," Schreiber says. "You don't want to have too much of a developed character or it will make people feel like they're not him. So the process of the first season is really the process of discovery for John, where he begins to have access to his emotional life and some personal memories he didn't have access to before. And the question of 'who is the Master Chief?' is really spooled out over the course of the first season. It's done in concert with John really discovering who he is himself. It's an opportunity for us as an audience member to learn things about the Chief that we didn't know before or that we had always filled in with our own personal details.”

Halo

Now that Master Chief has a face, it may be very difficult for the video games to continue as if we have not seen it - especially if Paramount's TV show is as big a success as all involved hope for. Could that mean we see Schreiber's likeness creep into the virtual space? He's not so sure. "I haven't heard anything about that, he says. "And I don't know that that's a necessary leap to make. But I will say that we're creating entertainment specific to the medium that it's being made for. Halo, as a first person shooter video game, you're meant to feel like you are the Chief. So the character development was specific for that purpose. He was always kept vague, so that as you say, I could feel like I'm him when I play. [The Halo show] is being made specifically for a longform television story. Really, the only way to do that and to connect with and empathise with a character over the course of a longform series is to get to know the character [...] Without having access to the face, there is no long-term development. The long-term development that you talk about as a Halo fan is because you put your personality in there. So that mystique that you're talking about, which was critical for the games, becomes a challenge when you're making a TV show. And so it was incredibly important from the very beginning to get the helmet off to show the face and get the audience comfortable with the fact that we're going to see the face and we're going to follow this character in a way so that you can empathise with him, you can be drawn along by the process.

Halo Television Screenshot

"Steve Downes' version of the Master Chief is so iconic and so beloved by so many - including me, I'm a huge fan of Steve. What he was able to accomplish over the course of the last 20 years, it doesn't take away anything from that performance either. If anything, we're adding to the Halo universe by fleshing out the character of the Master Chief in a way that you were never able to do in the games [...] That's one of my huge excitements, as well, bringing this universe that I've fallen in love with deeply over the past three years in researching it, and learning about the lore and the Halo mythology, bringing this universe to a whole new set of eyes and showing them why we love it so much. That's really what we have the opportunity to do here and what I'm so excited about. I really hope everyone can get on board with it and enjoy it. And if not, that's okay too. If you have an opinion that differs from mine, we respect it. There's as many opinions in the Halo universe as there are Halo fans. So it's all good and we respect you, and we look forward to you enjoying the show."

This interview was held in conjunction with journalists from Sci-Fi Vision, Shacknews, Comic-Con.com, LRM Online, and PopCulture.com. Halo premieres on Paramount+ on March 24.

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