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Pablo Schrieber cast as Master Chief for Halo TV series

astro

astro

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Oct 25, 2017
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No thanks to Steve voicing him in the armour. Let the actor do the full job, just do it well.
 
Einchy

Einchy

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Oct 25, 2017
42,659
I kinda forgot this was a thing.

Still looking forever to it but goddamn they sure are taking their sweet time.
 
Tuorom

Tuorom

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Oct 30, 2017
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xxracerxx said:
Ahh...the guy from The Wire.
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Damn didn't recognize him!
 

Deleted member 20284

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I fear Halo has put itself into a corner, by way of such a wait for content through games or this TV series. How does it play with fans when they've had all this time to build hype, excitement, their own expectations and then a finality of the one shot delivery with the show and Halo Infinite game. It's a corner 343 have to masterfully push their way out of. Halo 5 had a brilliant run in a quite similar fashion that objectively didn't follow through the game content post release or during the campaign really.

Remember we're talking 5 years for a game release since Halo 5, if Infinite releases late next year. As for the show we're talking 7 years since being announced in 2013, if it releases aligned with the game next year. After Infinite launches I truly hope we see a regular and deliberate schedule of content that combines the show and games meaningfully. Modern games provide a consistent reason for return, I don't just want to see "on par" with old games content through GaaS, I want to see raising the bar at launch and pushing further with quality and quantity as well as innovation. I'd like to see seasons of the TV show progress quickly as I also like to experience with games more rapidly than this current Halo drought. Cut the fat, move things along side by side and keep fans consistently engaged with the Halo story; not disparate stories and games years apart.

I'm sure 343 have a wonderful plan for the 3 months prior to game release and 2 years post release. I wait with reserved fanboyish following but I'd be lying if my expectations aren't through the roof for the next major content/game release associated with Halo. I hope the show and game deliver while having curated a pipeline for future sustain that will lead the pack. In the meantime I check into MCC occasionally still.
 

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Scullibundo said:
It's a TV show, not a movie.

Making a movie would have been smarter in the right hands.
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Everyone dodged a bullet with that Blomkamp-helmed movie getting canned.

Einchy said:
Really? That ain't too bad then.

It felt like it was announced in, like, early 2017.
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Well technically it was announced in 2013 at the Xbox One reveal, but it was pretty obvious at the time that they'd basically just inked the deal. And then all of Microsoft's TV ambitions save this one fell apart.

It's been in development for a while, but it's also not surprising it took this long to enter production.
 
DemonCarnotaur

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Stinkles I imagine you can't say too much, but any word on how close Covenant designs will stay to the games?

I know some have varied game to game, so that in itself isn't a simple question, though.
 
coma

coma

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Oct 28, 2017
3,589
Glad they got a good actor. Showtime has a pretty awful track record though, even when the shows have great actors. Hopefully it's good.
 
Scullibundo

Scullibundo

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Stinkles said:
General answers that are really just repeats of how I've always talked about the Halo games and fiction -- as opposed to show specifics, which we'll discuss later in the year and I am not touching at all here, by hint, by exception or by inference but as for game and story Chief so far...

Chief's appearance was described in detail in fiction quite some time before anyone even had an Xbox - in the origin setup story, the Fall of Reach we meet him as a child and an adult and he's not in that regard particularly unusual or striking. For the show, he's cast for his acting chops before anything else. But this response is about the game and the character background as it's been presented to date.

Most people experience Halo through the game - and in that regard you make plenty of fair points - and think of him as the guy in the green armor with the gold visor, or they think about their own actions in those games and stories. We also have a very big fiction following - and those people think of Chief sometimes in the ways described here - but also as a person with a distinct face, hair color, scars, freckles, the whole nine yards. In that sense, there's no wrong way to think about what he looks like, because while he's physically well-described, the value in the game can come from different angles because it's a vastly different medium.

Chief's in-game appearance is a hybrid of his purpose in the game, the usefulness or immersion of player agency being uninterrupted by that dissonance - which is why people sometimes shift (in both directions) between "I jumped over the thing" and "When Nathan Drake jumps over that thing..." as well as years and generations of design, content and story changes - not to mention technology, style and content evolutions. At the end of the first Halo game, that's cemented by Chief taking his helmet off as the camera pans away - both as a jokey nod to his anonymity, but also as an acknowledgment of what you the player had achieved.

His persona is a function of a similar thing - playing a story as "yourself" versus "experiencing a story about people and events" and obviously that's not limited to Halo by any stretch of the imagination and the faceless protagonist pre-dates the antagonist with a recognizable face. and that's not something that changed between how I have personally described it dozens of times when I was at Bungie, or since. IN all the novels where Chief is a featured character, his persona is obviously vastly expanded versus the games. And contextualized in a hugely different way by the nature of the medium.

Personally I have always thought of him both ways comfortably - including before I ever started at Bungie in 2003 - but obviously I read the book before I played the game - and further, I'm not a typical Halo fan. But I am also a Halo fan and my opinions aren't outliers by any stretch of the imagination - I've had hundreds of conversations about this with fans over the years and I'm somewhere in the middle.

As for your perfectly valid V for Vendetta example, I think personally that's a really different thing - for me, V is shown as literally a smiling Guy Fawkes throughout the entire movie (and comic) and his real appearance
is hidden because of the plot - he's hideously burned and is in a quasi romantic relationship with the female lead and his appearance is also used as the most direct visual inspiration for the revolution his actions incite - and further, is a physical requirement for the unfolding plot - they all wear the exact same masks to both maintain their anonymity and show homage to their "leader." SO for me his appearance is almost the opposite of obscured - it's the most profound and important visual element in the entire film - including the expression of wit and menace and in some shots even wistfulness - all with the same mask

Obviously I've given this a lot of consideration over the years, but I've tended towards the Judge Dredd example as a useful tonal or device comparison - where the mystery of his appearance evolves over time - first as a kind of artistic choice in a short form story - but over the years a fundamental component not of his mystery - but of his persona. He is literally a faceless avatar of justice and it becomes a kind of Rorschach test for whether you think he's a noble anonymous hero who eschews ego in the pursuit of justice or a "fascist thug" who lacks empathy - and the writers over the decades have done amazing things with that (including IMO the best comic book panel of all time) but Chief in all the games (and obviously you have strong feelings about them) utters action-movie one-liners, thoughtful questions and laconic jokes. He's at times respectful, somber, pensive and at times light hearted and glib.

Our audience has extremely subjective feelings about Chief where they talk about him as a fully fleshed out character in the fiction (as opposed to an avatar for their adventure) and they have wildly different interpretations of his relationship with Halsey, Cortana, the Covenant's nobility or the UNSC's decisions in defense of the Earth and her colonies. He's also, over the years become more of the focus of some stories since he's by necessity been at the center of the biggest events in the galaxy. Ironically one of our loudest complaints about Halo 5's story were variants of "not enough chief."

I'm actually fine with people having really different subjective feelings about Chief - what he represents to them, whether it be a tragic figure, a mythic hero whose fate and backstory are essential to how you want him to be portrayed, or if he's a faceless Virgil guiding them through a sci-fi world, and even if they just want him to be a camera they drive through the games to make stuff explode, as long as they get something meaningful out of those experiences in that medium.
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That was a very thoughtful response. Thank you.

I actually did read The Fall of Reach, so am fully aware of what John was. But yes, my preference of what he is, is a well-honed tool who is enigmatic because his personal feelings and emotions have been so calloused and hardened over time. That's what makes his relationship with Cortana work so well. She works perfectly to pry responses out of him. Their relationship was conveyed through powerfully subdued interactions that relied on subtext. Neither Chief nor Cortana would wear their hearts on their sleeves... until Halo 4. Halo 4's depiction of that relationship (especially the ending between them) really rubbed me the wrong way because it was so overt and unlike what I had grown to appreciate about their relationship.
 
Gundam

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Oct 25, 2017
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So this is in its own continuity then? Sounded at first like it would fit in the timeline, but I'm okay with this being closer to an adaptation of the universe than its own part of it.
 
Dragon's Game

Dragon's Game

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could Idris Elba possibly work, thinking about it......... like was it ever confirmed canon that Chief was a white guy in the first place?
 
Edward

Edward

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Oct 30, 2017
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Honestly i expected much worse from the casting but they picked a great actor and it's all i really wanted out if it. Assuming they are doing non-suit stuff otherwise it doesn't matter outside who voices it. He's fucking amazing in American Gods.
 
RatskyWatsky

RatskyWatsky

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Oct 25, 2017
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He's not someone who I would have thought of to play Master Chief (I figured they'd pick someone who looks like more of a jarhead) but he is a good actor, so it's nice they're prioritizing what's important.

Deception said:
In reality, it's a TV show on a medium level paid for cable channel. Expectations should be very middling for both the quality of the show and the quality of the cast. Had this been on something like HBO then they might have been able to secure talent of that caliber.
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Showtime routinely gets high caliber actors for their shows and Kyle Killen is a very talented writer. There are reasons to be pessimistic about this series, but it being on Showtime isn't one of them.
 
Kinthey

Kinthey

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Oct 27, 2017
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The Spartans have already been kind of demystified but I hope he'll at least never take that helmet off
 
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