10 Years of Being Max Caulfield

Max “Hella” Caulfield may have the ability to manipulate time and space, but despite her superpowers, it’s more than likely that this week’s release of Life Is Strange: Reunion, the latest in the celebrated and influential YA-coded choose-your-own adventure games that first debuted in 2015, is the moment we all start saying goodbye to Max Caulfield and Chloe Price. 

“It’s incredibly emotional and poignant and bittersweet,” said actor Hannah Telle, who’s been playing Max in Life Is Strange since the series became an unexecuted phenomenon. “I’ve been associated with this character for the majority of my career. Playing her 10 years ago was incredibly formative for me. Playing her again, as I am today, has been life-changing, as well.”

Max was—and is—quirky, weird, and importantly, cringe. Though a story about wielding magic, Life Is Strange, at its best, is grounded in stories about learning who you are and trying (and often failing) to be a good person. The cringe is the point, because Max’s cringe is our cringe.

The role, and Max’s journey, spoke to Telle because like Max, her own “anxiety and neurosis and nervousness had plagued me and it made other people anxious and nervous.”

After Life Is Strange, Telle called the next few years “a series of disappointments in my acting career that drove me to turn more to music.” She had a brief role in the HBO Max series Made For Love as “customer’s wife,” alongside a handful of other minor stints in a series of tiny films. It wasn’t clear acting was the path forward, driving her both to music and school, where she ended up graduating with a degree in neuroscience from the University of Southern California.

After she graduated, though, is when she unexpectedly stepped back into Max’s shoes, a character whose own identity and relationship with Chloe Price—either as a friend or something more, depending on your choices—has continued to endure in the minds of players.

“I think that her vulnerability is really relatable for people, and her sense of curiosity and keen observation and her sense of humor, which is often self-deprecating,” said Telle. “I think that was an interesting formula for a character that is not a likely video game hero. […] We’ve all had people like that in our lives who have changed our lives and who have made a huge impact on us. Living out Max and Chloe's relationship was really therapeutic for some people.”

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Interestingly, Telle is one of the few constants over the entirety of the series’ run.

Publisher Square Enix wanted to expand the series, drafting developer Deck Nine for Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (pretty good), Life Is Strange: True Colors (great), and Life Is Strange: Double Exposure (not great). The series’ original developers, Dontnod, made a divisive sequel without Max and Chloe that explored a (fantastic) story of two young brothers, and later decided to make a new take on the Life Is Strange formula with Lost Records (also not great).

Simultaneously, actor Ashley Burch, who portrayed Chloe Price in the original, was unable to reprise her role in Before the Storm, a story exclusively focused on Chloe, because of a labor strike by SAG-AFTRA during production. Deck Nine moved forward and hired non-union performers. Once the strike was over, Burch came back for a “bonus” episode alongside Telle. 

(Though it reportedly did not impact her participation in Before the Storm, Telle has disclosed she’s a “fi-core” member of SAG-AFTRA, a controversial middle ground that’s argued to undermine the union’s collective strength. In a Reddit AMA, Telle explained that “it's looked down on a bit but I need to work both union and non-union jobs to have enough money!”)

Actor Rhianna DeVries has performed as Max ever since, and holds the role in Reunion, too. Burch has publicly stated she “wasn't asked to reprise my role as Chloe.”

Double Exposure and Reunion were made back-to-back. It was exhaustive for Telle.

“It was so much traveling, which was a challenge for me to manage as a nervous traveler,” said Telle. “I had to really go into a strong headspace of focusing on my faith to get through going back and forth from New York to Denver [the home of developer Deck Nine] like that. My time in Denver was extremely concentrated, where we were doing long shoot days—many days in a row without a day off or a day to get accustomed to the elevation or just the jet lag. It was an extremely difficult filming process.”

Difficult enough that Telle didn’t really process that her time playing Max, one of the defining video game characters of the last 10 years, was over. She was just happy to be done filming.

One big difference between 2015 and 2026 is that Telle started out by recording lines exclusively in a voice over booth. With the most recent games, however, she’s doing full performance capture for a character that, previously, was hand animated by its developers.

“In the original game, you don't see her face moving with that kind of complexity,” said Telle. “I had to kind of figure out how to make my face work as her face.”