Dwayne Johnson Becomes a 70-Year-Old Chicken Man: 'Lizard Music' Starts Production at D23
Dwayne Johnson announced at D23 on Sunday, 16 August 2026, that production has begun on Benny Safdie's film Lizard Music, and the role is demanding something the actor has never done before: five hours of prosthetic makeup every day to play a man in his 70s.
Johnson plays the Chicken Man, a septuagenarian who teams up with a kid on an adventure to find the land of the lizards. The character even has a 70-year-old chicken named Claudia. Johnson described the role at D23 in Willy Wonka terms — a larger-than-life figure at the centre of a fantastical journey, according to Deadline.
The prosthetics come from Kazu Hiro, the makeup effects artist whose work was also nominated for The Smashing Machine — the A24 drama that first paired Johnson with Safdie. Hiro's transformation of Johnson for that earlier film already drew industry attention; Lizard Music pushes the process further, aging the actor by decades rather than altering his physique.
Lizard Music is based on Daniel Pinkwater's novel and is written and directed by Safdie. Amazon MGM Studios' United Artists label acquired the project in October 2025, after Deadline exclusively revealed the Safdie-Johnson reteaming the previous month. Johnson's Instagram confirmed a Summer 2027 release window on 26 July 2026, and on 2 August announced that Regina Hall has joined the cast. A character called Leber will make his feature film debut, per the same Instagram post.
For Johnson, the role follows a physically demanding stretch. After The Smashing Machine, in which he gained weight to play wrestler Mark Kerr, he had to shed that mass before filming Disney's live-action Moana remake, as Deadline reported in March 2026. The Scorpion King, back in 2001's The Mummy Returns, was his first significant experience in heavy makeup. Lizard Music takes that early chapter of his career and scales it into a daily five-hour ritual.
What makes this stand out is the direction Johnson is choosing. After years of franchise blockbusters and family comedies built around his own larger-than-life persona, he is handing his face over to a prosthetics artist and disappearing into a character three decades his senior, under a director whose work skews dark and intimate. Safdie, half of the duo behind Uncut Gems and Good Time, has now twice drawn Johnson into roles far removed from the action-star mould that made him a global box-office draw.
The Summer 2027 date places Lizard Music in the heart of blockbuster season — a corridor usually reserved for sequels and superhero tentpoles. A prosthetic-heavy literary adaptation from an auteur director, starring one of the most bankable actors on the planet, is an unusual fit for that window. Whether it draws families or a Safdie-leaning art-house crowd will be a question for opening weekend.
