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Halo Star Addresses Similarities To Star Wars’ The Mandalorian

Halo star Pablo Schreiber addresses inevitable comparisons between the video game-based show and Disney+'s hit series The Mandalorian.

Halo star Pablo Schreiber addresses similarities between the new video game adaptation and the hit show The Mandalorian. For decades fans have yearned to see the hugely popular sci-fi combat video game Halo adapted into a live-action epic. Now that dream will finally come true thanks to the upcoming Halo show on Paramount+.

Of course at one time there was talk of Halo making it to the big screen with eminent names like Peter Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro and Neill Blomkamp becoming attached at various junctures. Ultimately however it was the small screen that came for Halo, with American Gods star Schreiber taking on the key role of alien-fighting armored hero Master Chief. A trailer for the long-awaited show was finally released in late January, giving fans their first look at Master Chief and the rest of the Spartans as they flashed their iconic Halo hardware and got to work battling extra-terrestrial bad guys. Naturally, given the helmet-wearing look of Master Chief and his soldiers, comparisons were immediately made between this take on Halo and Disney+’s hit Star Wars show The Mandalorian, which of course features its own ever-helmeted hero Din Djarin.

Those Halo-and-Mando comparisons were obviously inevitable given the clear similarities between the two shows. Halo star Schreiber for his part did not shy away from such comparisons when he spoke recently to THR, but he also pointed out one big way his character differs from Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin:

“I was like, ‘OK, great, there’s a precedent and people are hungry for this genre and this material — because there is definitely overlap — and the success they had bodes well for us. Also, The Mandalorian is always helmeted and has to remain that way. In Halo, the Spartans take their helmet off a ton — it’s only Master Chief’s face you haven’t seen before.”

The Mandalorian indeed makes a big deal of Din Djarin removing his helmet, as for him to do so is literally a violation of his religious code (something that came up in a big way when Mando appeared later on The Book of Boba Fett). Helmets coming off will presumably not be such a massive thing on Halo as Master Chief is merely a soldier and not subject to a load of crazy rules about whether he shows his face. Of course for fans, the question of Master Chief wearing or not wearing a helmet is not so much about in-world factors but their own expectations as regards the show’s faithfulness to the source material. For the show to remain strictly faithful, Master Chief would indeed have to remain a mysterious warrior with his helmet always obscuring his human features.

Schreiber in fact addresses these expectations somewhat in his comments when he talks about fans never having seen Master Chief’s face. So clearly, Schreiber is sensitive to the notion that there are some Halo fans who think it would be a huge mistake for Master Chief to ever take off that iconic helmet, the argument being that to do so removes his mystique and makes him less interesting (such arguments were indeed bolstered when Boba Fett removed his helmet on The Book of Boba Fett and to many people became boring). It remains to be seen if fans and critics continue making comparisons to The Mandalorian, either positive or negative, when Halo the show hits Paramount+ on March 24, 2022.

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