The ‘Halo’ TV Show Will Reveal Master Chief’s Face, And It Looks Like This

There is a single rule about Master Chief in the Halo series, as there has been for 20 years. He never takes off his helmet, never shows his face.

While there’s no Mandalorian-like creed demanding that he does this, it’s just sort of how the character has worked all this time, an unwritten rule about Master Chief. A rule that’s about to be broken.

It’s now been confirmed that in the upcoming Paramount Plus Halo TV series, which premieres soon and already has been greenlit for season 2, Master Chief will reveal his face:

343 Industries’ Studio Head of Transmedia, Kiki Wolfkill, talked to IGN about it:

“I think we set out to tell a character story and a personal story,” she said. “And once we really got into what that story was, it became clear that you really needed to see the person in the armor and under the helmet.”

“You will see his face. For some people, it’s been a moment 20 years in the making, and for other people it is something that feels very hard to imagine. We absolutely respect both sides of that fence, those who really want to see Chief’s face and those who really don’t. But for the nature of this story, it felt really important to connect with the Master Chief in a different way, and that meant showing the face.”

It should not be a huge shock that this is where we ended up, given that from the start, the main question was why the series was not casting longtime Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes, given that presumably, you would just need a stuntman in the armor and the voiceover to be done later, if Chief is always in the armor. But with another actor cast, it makes sense the logical endpoint here is that chief was going to be shown without his helmet.

And we uh, know what his face looks like, since we know which actor is playing him. This is Pablo Schreiber, who you may recognize from American Gods or Orange is the New Black (yes, he played “Pornstache”).

What’s not clear is how often Chief will be seen out of his helmet in the show. In The Mandalorian, for instance, we saw Mando take his helmet off for just a small handful of scenes. That’s compared to The Book of Boba Fett which had Fett walking around helmetless for most of it. I would guess it’s not often, but we’ll see.

I remain…skeptical of this whole project. And I also think this is, what’s the word here, a bit presumptuous for this unproven Halo TV series to think it should be the place to reveal Master Chief’s face after all this time? I don’t know, that just feels weird to me. The trailer was fine, but I remain somewhat unconvinced about how this is going to go. I hope it’s a pleasant surprise and turns out to be really great, Master Chief’s face and all, but there are a lot of hurdles it’s going to need to overcome to both satisfy Halo fans and bring in newcomers. Halo launches March 24 on Paramount Plus.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.