During the XBOX show at the Tokyo Game Show 2026, Hideo Kojima finally revealed who will play the role of the protagonist of PHYSINT: Bill Skarsgård (who many will remember as the Pennywise of IT) will play the character we will control in the game. The creator of Metal Gear and Death Stranding also took the opportunity to take stock of OD, the other project that Kojima Productions is developing in collaboration with XBOX.

The Swedish actor joins a cast that already includes Charlee Fraser, Don Lee and Minami Hamabe, presented last year, and which is set to expand further, as Kojima has promised more announcements in the coming months. At the basis of the choice of this actor there is a long-standing mutual esteem, as the game designer himself explained: "we are both long-time fans of each other's work and we decided to embark on this new adventure together".

Over the course of the year, Skarsgård and Fraser have already participated in costume tests, scans and camera tests, a session that Kojima says gave him "enormous confidence in the direction of the project", helping to define his idea of the final form of the game in a much more solid way. It was from those days that the new key art shown during the show was born, created from a photo of the two actors taken personally by the game designer.

In addition to his role as Pennywise in the IT film and television franchise, Skarsgård's most recent works include Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire and The Death of Robin Hood, where he starred alongside Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer, while in the future we will see him in Peter Berg's The Mosquito Bowl and Andrew Niccol's Lords of War, alongside Nicolas Cage.

PHYSINT is the third original IP of Kojima Productions and is described by its author as the culmination of over 40 years of career, a project with which he intends to redefine the concept of action-espionage without being constrained by existing genres. The game, which recently passed under the editorial wing of XBOX after being abandoned by PlayStation, will be able to count on the full support of Microsoft, cutting-edge technologies and a cast of the highest level, with the aim of becoming a new reference point for the genre. Development is proceeding steadily, as is the work on casting, actor scans and collaborations with external creatives.

The partnership with XBOX was at the center of Kojima's speech, who recalled how Kojima Productions, founded as an independent studio at the end of 2015, celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. In recent months, the game designer visited the Redmond offices, where he spent time with Asha Sharma, discussing the future of video games and digital entertainment and finding a deep harmony on the goals to be achieved together.

Two new IPs are born from this collaboration, and the first to arrive will be OD, a horror made together with Jordan Peele that will be released before PHYSINT. Here, too, the work is proceeding smoothly: the performance capture and ADR recording sessions, suspended during the SAG strike, have restarted this year and production is on schedule. Kojima spent words of great enthusiasm for the intense interpretations of Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer and the rest of the cast, describing OD as a completely new type of game, designed to test the thresholds of fear and which is taking shape through continuous experimentation. More details will come later.

Kojima finally thanked players, fans and community for their support, as well as XBOX partners for believing in his vision. We now leave you to the words of Kojima himself.