CD Projekt Red brought us one of the most memorable moments of E3 2019 when Keanu Reeves stepped onto the Microsoft stage and revealed his role in Cyberpunk 2077 as Johnny Silverhand. He’s one of the most prominent characters in the game – with more dialogue than any other NPC, in fact – and it seems that Keanu brought a bit of himself to the role.
“When [Keanu] played Johnny Silverhand,” senior concept artist Marthe Jonkers tells us in an interview at Gamescom. “he also had his own ideas about ‘this is what Johnny would say’ or ‘he would sound like this’. It was more of a collaboration than us telling him ‘please do it like this’. So there’s a part of Keanu in there.”
Besides injecting himself into the role of Johnny, Keanu also took the extra mile when meeting the CD Projekt Red team. “He’s a really cool guy, that’s for sure. He did send a video to our whole team, a personal message to the team which was really, really nice.”
We look forward to eventually bringing you more concrete detail on Cyberpunk 2077 in the near future, but in the meantime I will never pass up an opportunity to write about Keanu Reeves being cool.
The Cyberpunk 2077 release date is scheduled for April 16, 2020, and you can follow that link for a big breakdown of everything we know so far.