Hideo Kojima has found the star of his next game. During Xbox's Tokyo Game Show 2026 broadcast on Thursday, the veteran designer announced that Bill Skarsgård will portray the lead role in Physint, the action-espionage title Kojima Productions is developing for Xbox. The reveal came with a new poster featuring a photograph Kojima personally shot of the Swedish actor alongside co-star Charlee Fraser, carrying the tagline "The Next Cold War Begins."

Skarsgård, best known internationally for his portrayal of Pennywise the clown in It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019), will headline a cast that already includes Fraser, Don Lee, and Minami Hamabe. In a statement issued alongside the broadcast, Kojima said he was "delighted to confirm the lead role" would go to Skarsgård, adding that the two were "long-time fans of each other's work" and had decided to embark on the project together. Costume fittings, scans, and camera tests conducted with Skarsgård and Fraser earlier this year, he said, gave him "tremendous confidence in the direction of the project."

Kojima made the announcement in person during the stream, appearing just as the Xbox Tokyo Game Show 2026 broadcast appeared to be closing. The broadcast also carried an update on the studio's other Xbox project, the horror title OD – Knock. Physint is a portmanteau of Physical Intelligence and is the third original intellectual property from Kojima Productions.

A return to espionage

Kojima has described Physint as the culmination of his 40 years creating video games. The project returns him to the spy-thriller territory he defined with the Metal Gear series, and Kojima Productions says the game will combine new technology with its cast to push the action-espionage genre forward.

According to Xbox Wire, Kojima also confirmed that Yoji Shinkawa, the artist behind the visual identity of Metal Gear, will serve as the game's character and mechanical art designer, reprising his role from prior Kojima Productions games. Kojima himself is credited with the scenario, production, game design, and direction.

The part is Skarsgård's first role in a video game. His film credits include Nosferatu, Barbarian, The Crow, John Wick: Chapter 4, Atomic Blonde, and Boy Kills World. He recently earned strong reviews for his performance in Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire and is set to star in Peter Berg's The Mosquito Bowl and Andrew Niccol's Lords of War opposite Nicolas Cage.

Xbox picks up the project

Physint will be published by Xbox after the project's original partnership with PlayStation fell through. According to a report from Get Your Comic On, Sony walked away from the deal as the game's movie-scale production ambitions pushed budget estimates beyond PlayStation's risk threshold, leaving Kojima Productions to find a new publishing home. Microsoft, already working with the studio on the cloud-powered horror title OD, stepped in under Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, taking the publishing rights and expanding the alliance to cover future film and television projects.

Xbox plans to release the game on Windows and an unspecified Xbox console, according to reporting by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. The same Tokyo Game Show broadcast carried an update on OD – Knock, the horror collaboration with director Jordan Peele starring Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer, which Kojima Productions plans to release before Physint.

What the casting signals

The announcement ends months of fan speculation that had pointed toward actors such as Robert Pattinson or Eddie Redmayne. The costume fittings, scans, and camera tests conducted with Skarsgård and Fraser through the year show the project moving into full production, with Kojima now building the game around a known lead performance.

Kojima said further casting announcements will follow. The poster is the clearest statement of intent yet: a blonde-haired Skarsgård, photographed by the director himself, standing beside Fraser under a tagline that positions the game as Kojima's homecoming to the genre that made his name. The phrase "The Next Cold War Begins" was widely read online as a nod to his return to espionage a decade after departing the Metal Gear series.