Bill Skarsgård is playing the lead in Physint, Hideo Kojima confirmed at the tail end of the XBOX Tokyo Game Show 2026 Broadcast, one week after XBOX took over as publisher of the action-espionage game following PlayStation Studios’ cancellation in June. Kojima showed up after the broadcast appeared to have wrapped and revealed a new poster featuring a photo he shot himself of Skarsgård alongside Charlee Fraser. In a statement, Kojima said the two are long-time fans of each other’s work, and that costume fittings, scans, and camera tests with Skarsgård and Fraser earlier this year gave him “tremendous confidence in the direction of the project.”
Skarsgård is best known as Pennywise in It and It Chapter Two, a role he reprised in last year’s HBO Max prequel series It: Welcome to Derry while also serving as executive producer, and his film credits include Nosferatu, Barbarian, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Crow, and Atomic Blonde. He most recently appeared in Dead Man’s Wire and The Death of Robin Hood, with The Mosquito Bowl and Lords of War opposite Nicolas Cage still to come. He joins a cast that already includes Fraser, Don Lee (Ma Dong-seok), and Minami Hamabe, and Kojima says more casting updates are on the way. As I noted last week, Physint is a spiritual successor to Metal Gear that won’t be called Metal Gear, and it remains to be seen which platforms it will release on or when.
Kojima also gave a progress update on OD: Knock, showing behind-the-scenes footage of Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer in a performance capture session. He said performance capture and ADR recording, which had been paused during the SAG-AFTRA strike, resumed this year and that production is proceeding on schedule. The last real look at the game was the trailer that debuted last September ahead of Tokyo Game Show 2025, which I said at the time looked terrifying. Both games fall under the expanded XBOX and Kojima Productions partnership announced last week, which also covers film and television projects, and the full segment is up on YouTube.
