The Bodhisattva of Action Films

Actor Keanu Reeves is apparently going to be a character, rock singer Johnny Silverhand, in the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077. 

Given the specificity of whom this info might appeal to, and the speed this kind of info travels on the internet, you either know this already or you simply don't care. But the Games Desk learned about this on Sunday and got all excited, and then had to wait three days to say anything while the other desks covered Kishi Bashi and Josh Rouse shows and then something from Jon Stewart.  Now we're worried about what might happen if all that pent-up energy doesn't find an outlet soon, so we're letting the Games Desk finally post the video below, including the big reveal in the last 30 seconds, to get it out of their system.

"OMG, OMG, OMG, it's Keanu!" the nerdier parts of the internet (and the Games Desk) were saying all day on Sunday as they played and replayed that big reveal at the end of the trailer.  Cyberpunk 2077 is the highly-anticipated new game from revered game studio CD Projekt Red, the makers of Witcher 3, hands-down the best open-world, role-playing game ever released. Cyberpunk has been in not-so-secret production for several years now, but very little has leaked about the game itself, and no one ever so much as guessed that Keanu Reeves might somehow be involved in the project.

Keanu is not only a bona fide legend to gaming fans for his roles in The Matrix and John Wick movies, as well as Point Break, Speed, and A Scanner Darkly, he's widely known as one of the nicest, most generous, and least egotistical stars in all of Hollywood (the late Bernardo Bertolucci even cast him as the adult Buddha in the film Little Buddha).

For a cinematic analogy, imagine learning that Georgia Lucas' Lucasfilms studio was remaking Gone With the Wind, and then it was announced that the film would star none other than Oprah Winfrey as Scarlett O'Hara.  No, that doesn't capture it.  Imagine learning that the surviving members of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were uniting to form a new supergroup, and lead guitar was going to be played by the resurrected spirit of Prince.  No, even that still doesn't quite capture it.  Imagine that HBO was going to return The Sopranos to the air and that it was going to feature the cast of Game of Thrones, except for the role of Tony Soprano who was going to be played by . . . Keanu Reeves! Yeah, we think that might capture it.

So, Keanu's involvement in Cyberpunk 2077 was Sunday's big reveal, and then on Monday, at the big E3 video game conference, this happened as Keanu was on stage hyping the new game:

"You're breathtaking!" became the most overused expression on the internet for the next 48 hours or so, especially after it was learned that CD Projekt Red gave a free advance copy of Cyberpunk 2077 as a reward to the person who shouted out, "You're breathtaking!"

And then, as if the hype wasn't amped up enough, everybody completely lost their shit when it was learned that the person who had won the free game told CD Projekt Red to give the money to charity instead of a free game to him.  Somehow, his selfless generosity just made Keanu look even greater, and memes like this started showing up all over the place:

By all accounts, Keanu is truly one of the few fine, outstanding - dare we say "breathtaking?" - people in Hollywood.  If you need any further evidence, listen to his answer on The Late Show when host Stephen Colbert tries to throw him with a difficult, if not nearly impossible, question:

Okay, so we got that out of our system.  We feel better now.  Meanwhile, as Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't come out until April 2020, we're still playing through Metal Gears Solid V.  According to the in-game stats, we're only 10% of the way through but we'll keep on plugging along (although it's not nearly as bad as we had first thought), at least until something better comes down the pike.