‘Halo’ Season 2: Pablo Schreiber Talks Master Chief ‘Regaining Personal Power’ (Exclusive)

Halo Season 2 is out now on Paramount+, and fans will find out what has happened to Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) after dying and Cortana taking over his body at the end of Season 1. PopCulture.com spoke to Schreiber about Master Chief’s character arc for the second season. 

“There’s going to be a lot that happens for John, as there was in the first season,” Schreiber told PopCulture. “It’s tightly entwined with loss and with the regaining of his personal power. It’s tied up in questioning his role as a super soldier in terms of Cortana and having her around or being on his own and what that means for him. His relationship with Cortana, what that means for him. And it’s obviously deeply entwined with finding the Halo.” 

The second season starts with Cortana taken out of the Master Chief’s body, which impacts him not for the better. “She’s been taken away from him and we don’t know why,” Schreiber explained. “And immediately it puts him in a place of questioning what it meant to have somebody for the first time, what it meant to experience having someone that can help you be better, and then what it means now to not have that and to be alone. And the first few episodes of the season are him wrestling with those ideas and then eventually finding his way back to her. And the nature of the relationship will be quite different obviously, given what he’s discovered about her in the time they’ve been gone.”

As the Master Chief tries to find the Halo, he encounters two new characters — James Ackerson (Joseph Morgan) and Talia Perez (Cristina Rodlo). Schreiber said that Ackerson “is the new boss. He’s the head of ONI, and he has essentially taken over the Spartan program. So the silver team has been confined to doing mop-up duty on some distant planet that they feel they’re overqualified for and nobody quite knows why. Everybody in the team is questioning John and asking him why. And it becomes clear pretty quickly that James Ackerson is the reason why, and it’s up to John to solve the riddle of what his intentions are and what he’s up to.” 

For Perez, Schreiber said she is “a Marine who in the first episode, he saves from a battle with the Covenant, and she represents the humanity, the boots-on-the-ground reality of the war with the Covenant in terms of from the Marines’ perspective.”

“He goes to her house in the second episode to get some answers from her about why she may have lied about something and ends up at dinner with her family. And what he experiences from her, and seeing her with her family and seeing her faith and how that plays out through her family and through her religion, are something that sets him into motion thinking about deeply, because he had this interaction with a woman on the planet in the first episode where she asks him if he has faith or if he has family.”

The first two episodes of Halo Season 2 are currently streaming on Paramount+. New episodes will debut each Thursday, and the finale is set to premiere on Mar. 21.