Halo star Pablo Schreiber on unmasking Master Chief and what to expect from the Paramount+ show

Nearly a decade after the series was first announced, the Halo TV show is finally premiering on March 24 on the Paramount+ streaming service. The big-budget sci-fi epic is based on the bestselling Xbox video game franchise about a far-future military unit battling a deadly alien organization known as The Covenant.

Players embody Master Chief in the first-person shooter series, a SPARTAN soldier bred for combat and covered head to toe in armor. While players never see Master Chief’s face, the Halo show takes a different tack — Pablo Schreiber (Orange Is the New Black) stars as Master Chief and it’s not long before the iconic mask comes off.

“If you’re going to try to hold an audience’s attention over the course of a long-form series, you really have to be able to have a connection with the character that you’re following,” says Schreiber ahead of the show’s premiere at SXSW. “You have to be able to have access to his face so you can know how he’s feeling about things, and what his emotional life is like over the course of time. That’s how we empathize and connect with our characters. So, it just felt like the obvious choice to make for the medium that it was being told in.”

Part of the allure of Master Chief in the games is that players can project themselves onto Master Chief — the helmet provides a sense of anonymity perfect for players from all across the globe. Yet, as Schreiber explains, different mediums call for different methods of storytelling. While the Star Wars spinoff show The Mandalorian stars a masked protagonist, the idea with the Halo show is to highlight the humanity at the heart of Master Chief.

“It really takes a different form of storytelling,” says Schreiber of adapting the game into a TV series. “And we’re filling in aspects of the character and his humanity that you as a player used to fill in with your own personality. And so, the process of the first season of our television show is the process of John [Master Chief is also known as Petty Officer John-117] getting to know who he is as a human. And therefore, we as an audience will all learn more about who the Master Chief is, over the course of the first season.”

“The process is really to take him out of that first-person shooter setup where he’s kept as a vague symbol and concept for all of us so that we can fill in the details with our own personality,” explains Schreiber. “We’re taking him out of that realm, and putting him into a television show where you as the gamer are being asked to put your controller down and not be a co-creator of the process, and now you’re being asked to kind of sit back on the couch and watch the Chief go through a very familiar universe that you’ll recognize immediately, but interact with him and interface with him in a way that feels very different.”

As the season begins, viewers meet Master Chief at a major crossroads. Ordered to terminate a young rebel woman named Kwan Ha Boo (Yerin Ha) captured in battle on the outer colony planet Madrigal, Master Chief breaks protocol and flees with Kwan in order to save her life. It’s a major change from the Master Chief players have come to know in the game, and sets up a new trajectory for fans and newcomers alike to latch on to.

“The process of the first season is really John answering the question, “Who is the Master Chief?” and him trying to figure that out and come to some of those answers for himself and experience humanity for the first time himself,” says Schreiber. “We’re really filling in the details that we’ve all have been wanting to know for so long. We’re going to answer some of those questions in the first season. And if you have the ability to sit back and enjoy the ride and let go of your own version of Master Chief, then I think it’s a very rich and rewarding universe to be in.”

“And it doesn’t devalue any of the Master Chiefs that exist,” Schreiber emphasizes. “There are as many different versions of the Master Chief as people who have played the game. And they’re all valid. They’re all self-created and user-created, and they’re all wonderful. This one doesn’t make those ones wrong, and it doesn’t take anything away from the [Master Chief voice actor] Steve Downes version, who created an indelible and amazing character over the last 20 years. If anything, the hope is that this television show only fills in those places that have been left unexplored.”

Halo is available now on the Paramount+ streaming service.