Raye Joins Benny Safdie's Lizard Music as Voice Actor and Composer
Singer Raye will voice a character and write the original music for Lizard Music, the live-action and CGI hybrid film directed by Benny Safdie, Deadline reported on Friday 30 October.
The film is a United Artists production, and Amazon MGM will release it. It is scheduled to open in cinemas on Christmas Day, 25 December 2027. Safdie wrote the script from the novel of the same name by Daniel Pinkwater.
The story follows a boy who discovers a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing music. Theo Leber plays the boy. Dwayne Johnson stars in the film and produces it through his Seven Bucks Productions banner. He plays The Chicken Man, an old man whose companion is an 85-year-old chicken named Claudia.
Johnson's look has already been seen. Variety reported this month that he filmed scenes in Brooklyn in old-age makeup, playing a 70-year-old man. The two stars have worked together before. The Hollywood Reporter reported in September 2025 that Safdie pitched Johnson for 45 minutes on a second project together, shortly after they finished production on their earlier film The Smashing Machine.
The wider cast includes Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Arya Parvathi, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, David Krumholtz and Andrew Dice Clay. Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbitt produce for United Artists. Safdie produces through Out for the Count Productions, and David Koplan produces through Magnetic Fields Entertainment.
The music news adds a new name to that list. Raye has charted 21 Top 40 singles in the UK since her debut in 2014, and her songs have passed 10 billion streams on Spotify. She is best known in Britain for a run of awards that peaked in 2024. That year she won six BRIT Awards in a single night, and she became the first woman named Songwriter of the Year. Her debut album, My 21st Century Blues, also took the Album of the Year prize at the same ceremony.
Her latest album, This Music May Contain Hope, came out in 2026. It won the Mercury Prize, the UK award for the best album of the year, and it was her first album to reach No. 1 in the UK. It also entered the top 10 in 16 territories.
For film fans, the appeal is the pairing. A singer with a Mercury Prize on her shelf is now writing music for a film built around a talking chicken and a broadcast of singing lizards. Raye's agents are Brillstein Entertainment Partners and The Team. Neither has said how many songs she will write or when she will record them.
The next checkpoint is the film itself. Cinema audiences will get their first full look at the finished work when it opens on Christmas Day 2027.
