Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise didn’t nearly voice Halo’s famous protagonist Master Chief, and Hollywood superstar Julia Roberts wasn’t nearly in Halo either. There was a conversation at a party once, between a casting agent and Halo voice director and composer Marty O’Donnell, but that’s as far as it got.
The rumour Cruise nearly fronted Bungie’s game began a year ago, when long-time Master Chief voice actor and former radio DJ Steve Downes said on his YouTube channel: “I believe Tom Cruise was actually mentioned as a possibility to do Master Chief.” The story goes that after the success of Halo 1, Microsoft insisted on a Halo 2, and apparently considered getting big-name actors for it.
In a new interview with GameInformer, O’Donnell has shed more light on the story, explaining that Microsoft “shipped” him to Hollywood parties because they’d seen a lot of anticipation for Halo 2, and O’Donnell had been considering widening the casting remit for the sequel anyway. It was at one of these parties a guy approached O’Donnell, put his arm around him and said: “Marty, you know, it’s time! This is a big deal. You’re in the big times now. You’ve gotta step everything up. We represent Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise.”
“Now, Tom Cruise was already a Bungie fan, believe it or not,” O’Donnell continued. “He had played Myth, so this wasn’t the first time we’d heard about Tom Cruise. It was this guy basically saying, ‘We should make this deal to get Tom Cruise to be Master Chief, and Julia Roberts to be Cortana in Halo 2.'”
O’Donnell’s response was performative. “I was like, ‘Wow that’s really cool! Yeah, thanks a lot,'” he said. Inside, though, he was never really considering it: “I knew that would have ruined everything.”
O’Donnell believed fans weren’t “blown away” by big stars but by a good game. “[Microsoft] wanted us to stay true to that relationship between us and the fans,” he said, “and if we just threw [in] Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, who I would have had a blast working with them – if I could have done that to begin with, maybe that could have been cool – but there was no way that I could replace Jen Taylor and Steve Downes, because the fans already had a relationship with those voices, because they were Master Chief and Cortana.
“I just could not think of replacing that, so that was never really in the cards to be considered, but I like to dangle it over Jen and Steve every so often, like, ‘You know, I could have gotten Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise.’ It’s just a fun story. It never went any further than that one conversation.”
Downes and Taylor have re-recorded their lines for this year’s remake of Halo 1 – Halo: Campaign Evolved – which Microsoft shared a longer look at during this year’s summer Xbox Showcase. It looked very colourful and lighthearted so there was some scepticism after the show, but we were really pleasantly surprised by Halo: Campaign Evolved when we played it.
