By Fresh off portraying an MMA combatant in Benny Safdie’s sports drama The Smashing Machine, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is boarding the filmmaker’s next venture, Lizard Music, where he’ll embody a 70-year-old grandfather figure… inseparable from a hen.
“Benny laid the story out for me afterward. Forty-five minutes later, when the pitch wrapped, I blurted, ‘I’m your Chicken Man,’” Johnson recalled during a TIFF career retrospective, per Variety. He revealed the picture will cast him as a “quirky, off-beat septuagenarian” nicknamed Chicken Man.
The feature adapts Daniel Pinkwater’s 1976 children’s novel of the same title. In the book, a youngster named Victor meets an odd elder called Chicken Man, decodes reptilian melodies, and accompanies him on a voyage to the lizards’ airborne isle.
Johnson’s newly lean frame previews the transformation demanded by the part. Viewers were startled when the former wrestler slimmed down after piling on bulk to play UFC legend Mark Kerr in Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, yet Johnson claims he’s “nowhere near” the final Chicken Man silhouette.
“I’m thrilled to morph again the way I did for Smashing Machine,” he told the audience. “This time it involves eating a lot less bird.”
While the premise sounds eccentric for the A-lister, Johnson has been chasing stranger, darker characters lately, tired of being typecast as a blockbuster juggernaut. “This desire has simmered in me for ages,” he confessed at the Venice Film Festival.