Trivia / Halo (2022)

• Author's Saving Throw: Executive producer Kiki Wolfkill said that Season 2 is intended to be a "gift to the fans" and win over naysayers who didn't like Season 1. Changes include:
  • Grittier, more intense action sequences that showcase just how deadly even a lone Spartan can be.
  • Tweaks to Silver Team's characterizations to make them more personable, which is more in line with canonical portrayals of Spartans.
  • An embrace of the franchise's signature chanting leitmotif.
  • Putting less emphasis on the Insurrection in the outer colonies and pirate factions and dropping the romance subplot surrounding Makee. The last part also pleased Pablo Schreiber, as he hadn't been the biggest fan of that development.
  • The season two finale goes a long way to mending this by having the introduction of the Flood be such a massive Conflict Killer it railroads the disconnected plot into one closer to the game's by their existence alone, something helped by the Flood outright wiping out the human antagonists en mass as they are unleashed.
• Channel Hop: The show was originally developed by and produced for Showtime, but a combination of the production delays due to COVID and changing needs with streaming services lead to being released on Paramount+.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The director for the first two episodes, Otto Bathurst, admitted in an interview that in retrospect, he feels the showrunners should have kept Master Chief's face hidden for longer than a single episode, though he stands by the decision to reveal it overall.
  • Pablo Schreiber was heavily against the infamous scene where Master Chief had sex with Makee, finding it to be a "huge mistake." He tried to have it removed, to no avail.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Of a sort. Marvin "Krondon" Jones III is an actor/rapper with albinism and plays Louis, a Spartan recruit who went blind from his augmentations. Krondon's own condition was used to reflect someone whose body chemistry was heavily altered.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Pablo Schreiber is tall but naturally a fairly skinny guy. He already had to bulk up in previous action movie roles, but knew he really needed to pack on muscle to portray a human tank like Master Chief. Similarly, all members of Silver Team would train together during production in order to handle the physicality of the role, emulate each other's body language as well as be able to act through the Mjolnir costume.
• God Never Said That: An interview article from Variety had a title saying showrunner Steven Kane claimed the crew "didn’t look at/didn’t talk about the game." Fans were quick to call out the crew for making an adaptation they didn't even try to research on. However, this isn't the full story and the line was Quote Mined out of context, as Kane said he didn't want to be limited "by [the franchise] being a game". The article itself goes to lengths about how the crew consulted with 343 Industries about the lore and mythology of Halo, which captured the crew's interest. This first episode alone having Mythology Gags to the games and expanded media was enough to support this. Furthermore, the Master Chief's actor, Pablo Schreiber, began the article by noting that he played the games after being hired for the role.
  Steven Kane: "Headlines are fun, but here’s what I really said: To make the Halo TV series, we started from the game, and then we made the pilgrimage to 343 to study the entire canon, so that we could bring you the FULL Halo experience!"
• The Original Darrin: In the Japanese dub, as a result of Ayumi Fujimura, who voiced Cortana since Halo 4, announced that she was on hiatus for an indefintie time from voice acting from 2019, Akiko Koike, who voiced her in the original trilogy, returns voicing her again.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Master Chief is played by Pablo Schreiber in and out of armor rather than being voiced by Steve Downes.
  • The Prophet of Mercy is voiced by Julian Bleach, on account of his original actor Hamilton Camp passing away.
  • Jen Taylor performed the Motion Capture in season one for an entire CGI Cortana. In Season 2 Christina Bennington performed full performance capture using her specific appearance under some post-production processing, while Taylor still voices the character.
• Practical Effects: The Mjolnir Powered Armor is a fully realized costume where the undersuit can serve as its own off-duty "hero" costume with UNSC signage. While exaggerated in speed and featuring other options for actor comfort, the Technology Porn of the suit-up sequence is almost identical to the actual construction. They also had hundreds of weapon props and Space Marine armor to fill out the battle scenes. While close-ups of the Prophets were done with CGI, distance shots and indirect angles were intricate animatronic puppets.
• Role Reprise:
  • Jen Taylor returns from the games as Cortana's voice actress. However, this time she also does the motion capture for the first season.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Raúl Anaya, Rona Fletcher and Erica Edwards reprise their roles as Master Chief, Catherine Halsey and Cortana respectively from the games.
  • Ditto for the Japanese dub, where Rikiya Koyama not only reprises his role as Master Chief, Akiko Koike also returns as Cortana, having last voiced her in Halo 3.
  • The Brazilian Portuguese dub brings in the Cortana from Halo Infinite.
• Scully Box: Spartans in the game canon are supposed to be about 7 feet tall in armor, Master Chief is about 6'9 out of armor, which makes them appear to be giants to the average human. The show cast a few reasonably tall actors, Pablo Schreiber is 6'5, but included thick-soled boots for their armor and paired them next to shorter actors when they wanted to exaggerate their size.
• Saved from Development Hell: A live-action film or TV show based on Halo's "main" story had been in the works since 2002, and was in various stages of development for twenty years.
• Troubled Production: A TV show was announced in 2013 with Steven Spielberg as a producer with the intention of dropping near the release of Halo 5: Guardians, but simply didn't without any commentary on the matter. The show was announced again in 2018 and Pablo Schreiber cast in 2019, but the first season changed showrunners from Kyle Killen to Otto Bathurst and Steven Kane just before production started, in addition to a Channel Hop from Showtime to Paramount+, dropping from ten episodes to nine late in the process and filming was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many have suggested this resulted in an uneven vision with the first season, and both Bathurst and Kane stepped down with David Weiner taking over for season two.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Talks of a live action movie started as far back as 2005, where Microsoft infamously sent actors dressed as Master Chief to deliver a script written by Stuart Beattie to numerous studios. Even though Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson got on board based on being fans of the games, with Neill Blomkamp sighted to direct, the project fell apart because Microsoft was being aggressive in negotiations and ultra-protective of the canon. Blomkamp directed several short films "Landfall" to promote Halo 3 and also serve as a proof of concept of what the movie would look like, and some production material went on to be used in District 9. Several other props ended up repurposed for internal Microsoft productions like Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn and Halo: Nightfall.
  • Talks were renewed to develop a TV show in 2014, produced and aired on Showtime. It was said they were planning for the show to be released in conjunction with Halo 5: Guardians but all information went silent, implying the project fell apart for unknown reasons. Production resumed in 2019 with the announcement of Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief, while production was delayed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  • Initially, Natascha McElhone was intended to portray Cortana, but scheduling issues due to the pandemic ultimately led to the decision to have Jen Taylor return to do both the voice and motion capture, though the CGI model itself is still based on McElhone's appearance.
  • Pablo Schrieber fought against having Master Chief have sex with Makee, but he was ignored and the scene went ahead as planned.