Halo’s Pablo Schreiber says his Master Chief was meant to be "slightly uncomfortable" for fans

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Exclusive: The Master Chief actor talks to SFX about thinking long-term with Halo

Halo
(Image credit: Paramount)

Having walked more than a virtual mile in Master Chief’s shoes on consoles, seeing Halo’s protagonist on our television screens was always going to take some getting used to.

Far from being the shoot first, ask questions later hero of the video games, the Halo series opted for a more introspective take on Master Chief. That, of course, includes the soldier taking off his iconic helmet and showing his face for the first time.

In a new interview with SFX magazine – in a special Pride issue featuring Netflix's The Umbrella Academy on the cover – Master Chief actor Pablo Schreiber has addressed what appears to be a very deliberate severing of the connection between fans and the iconic Spartan.

"The process of the first season was kind of breaking that relationship that people had with Chief, of knowing and recognizing him as themselves," Schreiber explains.

"We knew going into it that it was going to be a slightly uncomfortable experience for many viewers because of how long they’ve lived with this paradigm of Chief. But the idea is, for a long-form television series, hopefully that discomfort of the first season and the breaking of the paradigm will pay off long term in the relationship that you’ll get to have with this guy."

Halo is set to hit Paramount Plus in the UK on June 22. For more from Pablo Schreiber on the series, be sure to pick up the new issue of SFX Magazine from June 15, which you can order through that link.

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Darren Scott

I'm the Editor of SFX, the world's number one sci-fi, fantasy and horror magazine – available digitally and in print every four weeks since 1995. I've been editing magazines, and writing for numerous publications since before the Time War. Obviously SFX is the best one. I knew being a geek would work out fine.

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