Pablo Schreiber On Being Halo's Master Chief - "There's Not A Lot Of Character Development" In The Games
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
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