Halo Season 2: Who Is Riz-028, Explained

Halo Season 2 boasts a sprawling cast of new and returning characters – including Riz-028. To help you keep track, we’ve explained who Riz-028 is and who plays her in Halo Season 2 below.

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Who Is Riz-028 in Halo Season 2, Explained

Lieutenant Riz-028 is a Spartan supersoldier and a member of Silver Team – the unit headed up by Halo protagonist the Master Chief. Like all members of the Spartan-II program, Riz was abducted by the UNSC as a child and replaced with a short-lived “flash clone.” She then underwent an augmentation process that granted her superhuman strength, speed, durability, and senses.

Riz fights alongside the Master Chief and the rest of Silver Team throughout Halo Season 1, although their bonds are tested after the Chief probes the Spartan-II program’s origins. Like her teammates, Riz also removes her emotion-suppressing pellet. This makes her capable of greater independent thought, but more susceptible to pain, too. The latter side-effect becomes important when Riz is badly wounded during a skirmish with the Covenant in Season 1’s finale, “Transcendence.”

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Riz survives, however, she’s still not back at 100% six months later when Halo Season 2 kicks off. Despite this, she refuses to have her pellet reinserted and pushes her battered body to its limits in training – as does the Master Chief. Yet slowly but surely, Riz starts to consider life outside of Silver Team, following conversations with blind ex-Spartan Louis-036.

This all comes to a head in Halo Season 2, Episode 5, “Aleria,” when Riz catches a Covenant plasma blast in the back during the Fall of Reach. As in “Transcendence,” this potentially fatal injury doesn’t quite finish Riz off, but even after surgery, her combat prowess is diminished even further. And so – despite the Master Chief’s initial objections – Riz finally retires from active duty.

It’s worth noting that much of the above only applies to the “Silver Timeline” canon of the Halo show. Riz-028 only appears in one Halo video game, 2009 real-time strategy title Halo Wars, and then only via supplementary materials.

Who Plays Riz-028 in Halo Season 2?

Natasha Culzac portrays Riz-028 in Halo Season 2, reprising the role from Season 1. Born in Hastings, East Sussex in the UK, Culzac embarked on her acting career relatively late in life. Before becoming an actor, she worked as a journalist, and later as a marketing and communications expert at a homelessness charity. Culzac also briefly modeled.

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Culzac got her start as an actor via a string of short films, before landing a role in 2019’s Men in Black: International. Other high-profile productions soon followed, including Netflix shows The Witcher and Cursed. Halo is her biggest acting gig to date.

Halo Season 2 is currently streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes dropping Thursdays.