Los Angeles (CNN Business) Keanu Reeves is having a moment. He's even become a meme after announcing that he'd star in a new roleplaying video game, Cyberpunk 2077. He recently appeared in Netflix's "Always Be My Maybe" as the lead's brief love interest, a space case celebrity too infatuated with himself to be her endgame lover. But he is, in reality, the opposite of that character, according to one of the video game's designers.

Cyberpunk 2077, made by video game company CD Projekt Red, features V — a character the player customizes — who has a malware-infected biochip in their head. That malware takes the form of Johnny Silverhand, played by Reeves.

Pawel Sasko, the game's lead quest designer, said that CD Projekt Red knew it wanted to bring back Johnny Silverhand, who was a rock band frontman in the 90's role-playing title, "Cyberpunk 2020." (Reeves did not play the character in the previous game, which was a pen-and-paper role-playing game.)

The developers needed "a strong actor that would be able to play this role" from almost the beginning of the game to the end, Sasko said.

Keanu Reeves on stage at E3

Johnny Silverhand is one of the characters that players interact with the most. CD Projekt Red asked Reeves to play Johnny because the actor had a history of playing "very strong characters that are often fighting for something," said Sasko. Sasko cited Reeves' roles as Neo in "The Matrix" trilogy and as the eponymous hit man in the 'John Wick' films.

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