Square Enix will reveal the conclusion to the story of “Life Is Strange” characters Max and Chloe with the release of “Life Is Strange: Reunion” on Thursday. Without giving away major spoilers, the video game actors behind the duo can’t share much about how the story ends, other than what their personal experiences were playing Max (Hannah Telle) and Chloe (Rhianna DeVries) for ostensibly the last time.
“It was weighing on me while we made the game that this was my last time to play Max,” Hannah Telle told Variety in an interview last month ahead of the new “Life Is Strange” game release. “It’s hard to let her go and to understand I gave everything that I had and put all my life experience and personal trauma and pain and love and joy. Everything I experienced in my own life, I put into relating to her life and portraying her story as best as I could. So I just focus on how thankful I am that I got to do it at all in the first place. And I had to focus on my faith that I would be able to get through making the game and not be too sad and caught up on the fact that it was over, and be able to focus and do my job to the best of my ability. It was definitely challenging. And now it’s sad that it’s coming to an end, but I think these characters are eternal. This might be the end for me and Rhianna playing these characters, but as we all know, there’s an Amazon series filming. This is going to be a live-action show that’s going to reach even more people than before.”
Square Enix
Telle is right: Amazon recently cast Maisy Stella and Tatum Grace Hopkins in the roles of Chloe and Max, respectively, in its live-action “Life Is Strange” TV series.
“These characters’ bond is going to impact millions of people that it never had before,” Telle said. “There’s been many Superman actors, and I’m sure there’ll be many Maxs and many Chloes. But it has been the ultimate honor of my life and acting career to get to be Max Caulfield, and I am so grateful. It has meant everything.”
Telle has played Max throughout all the installments in the “Life Is Strange” video game franchise, while DeVries took on the role of Chloe after original actor Ashly Burch departed the 2017 project amid a voice actors strike.
“I don’t know that I prepared and approached it as the end, mostly because Chloe’s arc in this,” DeVries teased. “It’s interesting because every time I concluded a game in this series, like ‘Before the Storm,’ and I thought that Chloe wasn’t going to come back — and then I did the facial mo-cap for the remastered collection. And then I was like, OK, she’s probably not going to come back. And I just really love having gotten to do it at least one more time. I don’t think I was thinking about it as the end as it was happening. I was just happy to be there.”
Square Enix
Square Enix
Developed by Deck Nine Games, the finale picks up after the events of “Life is Strange: Double Exposure,” with Chloe’s return tied to Max’s timeline-shifting abilities. Max returns with her signature Rewind power — now evolved with new capabilities, including the ability to leap into Polaroid photographs and restart events from those captured moments. Meanwhile, Chloe has grown into her role as touring band manager for Drugstore Makeup, bringing her trademark Backtalk ability and unfiltered attitude to investigations where Max’s academic position limits her access.
The game honors the weight of player choices from the original, allowing players to define whether Chloe survived the storm in Arcadia Bay and the nature of their relationship — whether friends or lovers.
“I was overjoyed to get to deepen and explore further the relationship between Max and Chloe as more mature people who have had time apart to come into their own as different people with different experiences, but also their shared collective trauma,” Telle said. “It was just really rich material to get to explore. They’re each other’s soulmates, whether they’re lovers or friends. So getting more time together offered a chance to think about relationships that have been apart for a while, but are monumental. When you come back together, the two people have changed. And is the promise that we made to each other back then still the promise that we’re going to keep making to each other forever, because we’ve become different people?”
DeVries was excited to return not only to work alongside Telle and complete Max and Chloe’s story, but because “Life Is Strange: Reunion” offers a unique feature to “Life Is Strange” fans: The ability to play as both Max and Chloe.
“Learning that not only is Chloe coming back, but that I would get to work with Hannah was a huge, huge deal,” they said. “It was incredibly thrilling, and I’m really, really grateful to be back. I did not think that Chloe would be returning. Especially after we finished filming ‘Before the Storm,’ it was made pretty clear that it’s very unlikely that Chloe would return outside of little cameos or things like that. But to learn that in this game, you’re playing both as Max and as Chloe, and that I get to play opposite Hannah. Huge, huge deal. Made my whole year.”