Dwayne Johnson becomes a 70-year-old Chicken Man for Benny Safdie's Lizard Music

Dwayne Johnson spent Tuesday in Coney Island as a 70-year-old man. Set photos from Benny Safdie's Lizard Music show him in a tan bucket hat and coat, slice of pizza in hand, walking next to young co-star Theo Clark Leber, who carries an oversized lizard plush. Johnson plays a character known only as the Chicken Man.

It is the second time in a row that Safdie, whom Variety still introduces as the director of Uncut Gems, has hidden Johnson under prosthetics. The first time, in 2025's The Smashing Machine, he became MMA fighter Mark Kerr. This time he goes the other way: not bigger, older.

The face belongs to the man who aged Tom Cruise

Johnson's look is the work of Kazu Hiro, Variety reports. Hiro also turned Tom Cruise into an elderly oil baron for Digger, so two of the biggest action stars in Hollywood have now been aged on screen by the same artist.

Hiro is not a hired hand from the effects department. He won the Oscar for makeup and hairstyling at the 92nd Academy Awards for Bombshell. In his acceptance speech he thanked his mentors, Rick Baker and Dick Smith. Digger is already on the awards radar: Variety's early Golden Globe tracker lists Cruise among its predicted nominees for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.

The transformation started before the makeup chair. At a career retrospective at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival, Johnson said he had shed 30 pounds of muscle to play the Chicken Man, and that it took Safdie "about 45 minutes" to convince him to sign on. He summed up the diet in three words: "eating less chicken."

He also made clear that the prosthetics were the point, not a side effect. "I'm so excited to get a chance to hopefully transform again like I was able to do in 'Smashing Machine,'" he said in Toronto. Thirteen months later, the photos from Brooklyn show how far the second transformation goes: the bucket hat, the coat and the face of a man in his seventies, on an actor who was a fighter in his last film with the same director.

What the last Safdie-Johnson film actually earned

The Smashing Machine is the reason a second collaboration makes sense on paper and the reason it is a gamble at the box office. The awards side and the money side point in different directions:

• Venice 2025: Safdie won the Silver Lion for Best Director, according to the festival's official list of awards. The Golden Lion that night went to Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother.
• Golden Globes: two nominations, for Johnson as Best Actor in a Drama and Emily Blunt in Supporting Actress. No wins.
• Domestic opening: $5,841,662, per Box Office Mojo, for an A24 release.
• Worldwide total: $21,131,147, with $11.4 million of it from North America. The film runs 2 hours 3 minutes and first opened on October 1, 2025.

For an actor whose franchise films are measured in hundreds of millions, that is a small number. It also put him in a Golden Globe drama lineup, and he went straight back to the same director for the next transformation.

A children's book with a heavyweight cast

Lizard Music adapts Daniel Pinkwater's children's novel of the same name. The official logline: a young boy "stumbles upon strange lizard musicians on late-night TV, leading him to befriend a peculiar man with an elderly chicken."

The book, still in print from New York Review Books for readers aged 10 to 14, fills in what the logline leaves out. The boy is Victor, left home while his parents are at a resort and his older sister skips her babysitting duties. His list of favorite things starts with pizza with anchovies and B movies that air at midnight. In the city of Hogboro he meets the Chicken Man, who is called that because of Claudia, an intelligent hen who lives under his hat.

So the bucket hat in the Coney Island photos may be doing more work than it looks. In the book, the hat is where the chicken lives. Together, Victor, the Chicken Man and Claudia travel to the lizards' floating island.

The supporting cast is the kind usually assembled for prestige drama rather than a story about lizards on late-night television: Rachel McAdams, Colman Domingo, David Krumholtz, Jeff Goldblum, Alicia Silverstone and Regina Hall. Domingo is also in the middle of an awards season of his own: he is in Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic that passed $1 billion worldwide this year.

The film comes from Amazon MGM Studios, which has dated it for Christmas Day 2027. That puts the release more than a year away, with filming still underway in Brooklyn this week. A first trailer, the full look at the Chicken Man in motion and any word on a festival premiere are all still to come. Until then, the Coney Island photos are the only look at Johnson's Chicken Man.