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Keanu Reeves to star in Cyberpunk 2077, with release date of April 2020

He'll be playing Johnny Silverhand, a mainstay of the Cyberpunk series.

Oscar Gonzalez Former staff reporter
Oscar Gonzalez is a Texas native who covered video games, conspiracy theories, misinformation and cryptocurrency.
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Oscar Gonzalez
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Cyberpunkpunk Keanu

Keanu Reeves IRL at E3 2019.

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Cyberpunk 2077 showed up at the E3 2019  Microsoft press conference on Sunday, and there's a new star of the show: John Wick himself, Keanu Reeves. His character is Johnny Silverhand, who was in the original pen-and-paper Cyberpunk game.

The premiere of a new Cyberpunk trailer ended with Reeves' appearance. He announced that the game will launch on April 16, 2020. 

In the trailer, V is about to make a deal for a chip and has a flashback to his friend dying during the heist. 

When he comes back to present time, he finds himself betrayed and has to use his cybernetic body to take out the bad guys. It's later in the trailer when Reeves shows up. It's an evolution of what we learned last year about Cyberpunk 2077

Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077.

CD Projekt Red

Johnny first appeared in the pen-and-paper RPG Cyberpunk 2013, subtitled Welcome to Night City and released in 1988, according to the Cyberpunk wiki. Johnny is the lead singer of the band Samurai and is known as a Rockerboy, a group of musician misfits who fought against corporations and the government. The trailer suggests the character seen is a holograph of the original Johnny Silverhand, who died during an event in the pen-and-paper game called the Fourth Corporate War.

While on stage, Reeves was "heckled" by a member of the audience, but in a loving way. The actor said that being in the streets of the future in Cyberpunk was breathtaking, to which a guy yelled "you're breathtaking," prompting Reeves to respond in kind. 

The person who yelled out the comment was YouTuber Peter Sark, who took to Twitter to proclaim "Keanu Reeves just announced to the world that I'm breathtaking." This caught the attention of Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, which replied, saying Sark would receive a free collector's edition copy of the game. 

We're there

CNET is on the ground, covering E3 2019 alongside our sister site, Gamespot. We'll update this page throughout the show as more games are announced.

Originally published June 9.
Updates, June 10: Includes tweet from developer; June 11: Adds background info on Reeves character.

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