Keanu alternatives

[Tiger667]

I love this game, let me get that out of the way first.
I also love Keanu's performance in it and the music from "Samurai" is decent enough.

But I have to wonder if this wouldn't have been even better with, for instance, Henry Rollins in the main role and doing the music.
His experience on screen as well as with Black Flag and Rollins Band make him seem like an ideal fit.
Just imagining it gives me goosebumps.

Anyone else have alternatives in mind?

 

[LeKill3rFou]

If I remember, @Cali66 suggested Kurt Russell (young) and I think he would be great as Johnny too

 

[AlienSpaceBats]

Serious answer: Sam Rockwell or Michael Biehn.

Joke answer: Jemaine Clement channeling David Bowie.

 

[Tiger667]

Those are odd choices. I'm not seeing it.

 

[LeKill3rFou]

Michael Biehn

Seem good too
(but young too. As he was in T1^^)

 

[GogRelvas]

Another Johnny, Depp

 

[DC9V]

Introverts like Keanu Reeves or Johnny Depp are talented in playing the role of an extrovert as it allows them to distract from their own personality in order to protect their tender hearts. Johnny Silverhand is just like that, except he never managed to stop acting after leaving the stage, until he eventually lost his soul.

 

[tru3story]

Nope. I actually only like Keanu.
And Ryan Gosling.
But that's it.

 

[chadesh]

hmmm how about the bill and teds excellent adventures keanu and johnny silverhand arguing with each other about music.

 

[mightymatt27]

With his ties in to action/Sci-fi, I think Keanu was probably the best choice. Though I'll defiantly grant that Rollins would be an awesome alternative or even as an additional character.

I can only think of best/worst Keanu alternatives to Jonny. Since two criteria were mentioned, acting chops and musician, I'll nominate Jack Black.
-- ducks and runs for cover--

 

[devivre]

I do think Keanu made sense in terms of energy and charisma. Also, Cyberpunk is a good fit to the roles he usually plays.

But I must agree a young Kurt Russell could have been pretty awesome.

Other than that, maybe someone like Jason Momoa might have fit too.

 

[Tvaroog]

They could have approached Silverhand's character from many different angles. Mike Pondsmith had this to say on Reddit about Silverhand's original design:

Bowie with a tiny bit of Bryan Adams TBH. But I like Keanu's take and Bowie is dead anyway.

Mike, Bowie may be dead, but Ricky Gervais is alive and well

Now everyone repeats that Johnny was supposed to look like David Bowie. Nobody ever mentions the Bryan Adams part.

By the way, today I learned that Adams is also a photographer (click if you want to see Pink topless).
Anyway, the problem is, the image below doesn't look like Bowie to me:

Aside from the fact that it's drawn like a comic book super hero, that is, with clothes so tight that he's basically nude; he reminds me more of metal bands from the 80's.

Of course Bowie would change his image more frequently than Madonna, in this clip from 1973 for example he wears two distinct costumes.

1988, when Cyberpunk RPG first came out, was the tail end of hair/glam metal, which was soon to be replaced by new look and sound.

Here's another quote about rocker boys from Mike Pondsmith:

Rocker boys are more than just people who get up with a guitar and play. I like to think one of the prototypical rocker boys might be Bono from U2. In that the music that U2 is writing is political, it's meant to get people up and in the streets; it's meant to expose corruption, indifference, problems that are happening every day. So it's music with a challenge.
But rockerboy doesn't have to be a musician. A rockerboy can be anyone who's orator of the people, anybody who can talk to others and convince them by the power of words, music, sometimes art and so forth.

So a rocker boy is sort of a political activist. U2's songs in the 80's used to be considered political, but their message is rather pacifistic:

There were some who saw the song as a glorification of the Troubles and a call for revolution. In order to squash these ideas, Bono introduced the song by saying, “This song is not a rebel song. This song is Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

The Clash were a little more militant. Still, quite popular. As people pointed out, Johnny in some of the concept art kinda sorta looks like Joe Strummer:

But those leather pants remind me of Jim Morrison:

Hardcore punk bands of the 80s were very political, but by design, didn't have mass appeal.

As I mentioned in the other thread, CDPR wanted to move the soundtrack from the 80's to 90's. P.T. Adamczyk:

Cyberpunk music from the ‘80s and that retro-futurist take is still very optimistic in a way and this game is not that optimistic. Although very dark at times, things like Blade Runner still have a sense of fairytale. I guess one way of looking at the difference, the ‘80s is the Mötley Crüe decade and the 90s is the Nirvana decade. They’re still playing rock music but it’s a different take

The Refused split up, like SAMURAI. They made similar music, certainly in our version of cyberpunk. In the original, Johnny is more like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, he’s more like a prog rocker who can shred. Our version is basically a rhythm guitar player. Also, the rebellious attitude that the Refused had, especially on The Shape Of Punk To Come, they were really vocal politically, their songs had a lot of that sort of 90s attitude and they were a 90s band.

The original design of Silverhand certainly evokes the heavy metal virtuosos. If they decided to go this route, my personal pick would be Alexi Laiho, as I listned to early albums of Children of Bodom on repeat back in a day. Sadly he passed away two years ago. He looked bad those last couple of years, probably wouldn't be able to do it anyway.

And he wasn't American nor an actor. Which leads us to Keanu. As Zappa said:

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

But there is one band that changed the world: Wyld Stallyns. You can see that even the Johhny Silverhand's costume was copied from that movie.

 

[Tvaroog]

Here's what the story director Marcin Blacha said about the writing of the character:

Johnny Silverhand in our source material and the Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077 are very different from one another. Based on the information from Cyberpunk 2020, we tried to create a very complex character that will seem annoying and repulsive at the beginning of the game, and eventually, at the end of the game, V will want to give their life for Johnny.

This character was mainly written by Aleksandra Motyka and myself. Preparing to write Johnny, we read biographies of punk musicians, and we were even inspired by the romantic heroes created by Lord Byron.

We decided that Johnny would be a character who never deals with little things. Whatever he does, right or wrong, it always has to be on a grand scale, and it always has to have tremendous results. Ultimately, we created a character for whom death is nothing and being true to his beliefs is everything.

Johnny was always meant to be a character that changes over the course of the game, and it was difficult for us to engineer a transformation from a complete asshole who doesn’t care about others to someone who is a caring friend to V.

Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz about how they decided who's gonna play Johnny:

Everybody and their great grandmother seemed to have an idea, and the process actually involved a lot of people. The game director, character artists, writers, marketing staff, I could go on. You know, we cast a pretty broad net initially. We considered actors, we considered enlisting actual rock stars — you know, band frontmen to play the role.

At one point we even toyed with the idea of taking and reviving a recently deceased longtime luminary of the recording industry. Now some might say that it was a pipe dream to assume we could do that — technologically or otherwise — well, I'll see you that pipe dream and raise you another because one could easily say that it was a pipe dream to assume that we could successfully pitch to, and ultimately enlist Keanu Reeves to play the role.

Because of what Mike Pondsmith said, and because he died in 2016 people assume that the deceased musician must have been David Bowie.

Made with https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo

 

[Nevver_]

I love this game, let me get that out of the way first.
I also love Keanu's performance in it and the music from "Samurai" is decent enough.

But I have to wonder if this wouldn't have been even better with, for instance, Henry Rollins in the main role and doing the music.
His experience on screen as well as with Black Flag and Rollins Band make him seem like an ideal fit.
Just imagining it gives me goosebumps.

Anyone else have alternatives in mind?

I love Rollins; I used to go see Black Flag back in the day and got turned on to them when I was working for a live sound reinforcement company and we got hired to provide a PA for a show - I became an instant fan of the band. Saw Rollins Band a bunch of times and even know the guy who was the drummer back then; the band was based locally to me because of where that drummer and the original bass player were local to the area and we share some common friends. Lots of background.

Now that I'm done being a douchebag and name dropping...

Rollins was awful in Johnny Mnemonic, though a bit better in The Chase because he was accidentally funny (playing a cop! lol!). He's great and I love his music but he is a terrible actor.

 

[MrGuyton]

John Lydon would be an amazing Johnny Silverhand

 

[SonitoCarlito]

Mr. James Hetfield (Metallica) fits well at first glance. or Mr. Jared Leto (30 seconds to Mars).

 

[MartineDee]

I actually like redheads.
And I like showdowns.
That is all Johnny is all about after all.

David Caruso for Johnny.

 

[GogRelvas]

They could have approached Silverhand's character from many different angles. Mike Pondsmith had this to say on Reddit about Silverhand's original design:

Mike, Bowie may be dead, but Ricky Gervais is alive and well

Now everyone repeats that Johnny was supposed to look like David Bowie. Nobody ever mentions the Bryan Adams part.

By the way, today I learned that Adams is also a photographer (click if you want to see Pink topless).
Anyway, the problem is, the image below doesn't look like Bowie to me:

Aside from the fact that it's drawn like a comic book super hero, that is, with clothes so tight that he's basically nude; he reminds me more of metal bands from the 80's.

Of course Bowie would change his image more frequently than Madonna, in this clip from 1973 for example he wears two distinct costumes.

1988, when Cyberpunk RPG first came out, was the tail end of hair/glam metal, which was soon to be replaced by new look and sound.

View attachment 11342308

Here's another quote about rocker boys from Mike Pondsmith:

So a rocker boy is sort of a political activist. U2's songs in the 80's used to be considered political, but their message is rather pacifistic:

The Clash were a little more militant. Still, quite popular. As people pointed out, Johnny in some of the concept art kinda sorta looks like Joe Strummer:

But those leather pants remind me of Jim Morrison:

Hardcore punk bands of the 80s were very political, but by design, didn't have mass appeal.

As I mentioned in the other thread, CDPR wanted to move the soundtrack from the 80's to 90's. P.T. Adamczyk:


The original design of Silverhand certainly evokes the heavy metal virtuosos. If they decided to go this route, my personal pick would be Alexi Laiho, as I listned to early albums of Children of Bodom on repeat back in a day. Sadly he passed away two years ago. He looked bad those last couple of years, probably wouldn't be able to do it anyway.

And he wasn't American nor an actor. Which leads us to Keanu. As Zappa said:

But there is one band that changed the world: Wyld Stallyns. You can see that even the Johhny Silverhand's costume was copied from that movie.

Uau, maybe even the Afterlife came from there

 

[MrGuyton]

Mr. James Hetfield (Metallica) fits well at first glance. or Mr. Jared Leto (30 seconds to Mars).
View attachment 11342578 View attachment 11342581

Unfortunately Metallica are the least likely to be rebelling against the corpo though!

 

[mightymatt27]

David Caruso for Johnny.

Now all I want is a special mode you can turn on and all of Johnny's lines are some form of the lowered sunglasses/Won't be Fooled Again intro thing.