Hideo Kojima’s Physint has a leading man in Bill Skarsgård, and the Hollywood actor recently spoke more about his part in the game. Billed as a spiritual successor to Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid franchise, Physint is an action-espionage game that features Skarsgård alongside several other actors, like Charlee Fraser, Don Lee, and Minami Hamabe. Skarsgård’s love for the Metal Gear Solid franchise and a chance to work with Kojima proved to be the deciding factors in taking on the role of the unnamed Physint protagonist.
“I played every single one,” Skarsgård said to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “Starting from the one on PlayStation One all the way to the last one. I was very enamored by him [Kojima], the mythology and the universes that he creates, but also the mystique and the allure about him, as well. He is an auteur, but he’s a video game auteur. He’s fluent in filmmaking, and film, and cinema.”
Skarsgård believes that Kojima’s cinematic video games are a new medium that he’s pioneering, and with Physint, the developer is getting closer to “something that’s photorealistic and also interactive,” the actor said. “I think he’s a pioneer, and he keeps going out to untreaded waters.”
Kojima is also a fan of Skarsgård, and he recently spoke about how he was introduced to him through a mutual acquaintance, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach composer Yoann “Woodkid” Lemoine. After traveling to Sweden to meet Skarsgard and his family, Kojima pitched him the lead role in Physint, which Skarsgard accepted.
While it looks like production on Physint is starting to pick up steam, it’s still early days for the project. Kojima previously revealed that the script for it is ready, but there’s still work to be done on motion-capture and filming performances. Sony was originally funding development on it, but after the PlayStation company pulled support for it, Kojima found a new home at Xbox for Physint. The developer has described Physint as the “biggest-selling” game that he could possibly create, and Xbox is also funding development on his upcoming horror game, OD Knock.
